During one of my college summers working for this Americorps program, I had this kid. This. Awful. Kid. By “awful” I really mean that he was charming, energetic, smart, great at reading with his counterparts who could not, witty enough to do some severe laughter-damage to my ribs, and as adorable as all get-out. But as much as I loved him – he was not creative. And I don’t mean that in a way that a lot of my friends say “oh, I’m not creative”, yet they can decorate a room or take beautiful photos or solve problems well – they just mean they can’t draw. I mean we had an entire table full of art supplies and he never knew what to do with it. Huge, deep boxes of found materials just waiting to be pawed through and put to use. Empty boxes waiting to be made into towns. He couldn’t come up with something to draw that was not copied from a picture book or a television character conjured from his brain. If you’d take him outside to play, he’d complain that it was too hot and he wanted to go home to his air conditioning and play video games – he could not creatively amuse himself with some basic sports equipment. He knew every single basketball, baseball, and football rule and could play them all well, but couldn’t play in an open-ended way. He whined several times a day about wanting to go home and play videogames or watch TV. All of his play was centered around videogames and TV. He was five years old and had already forgotten how to play. I became terrified that I would have kids like that and swore they wouldn’t have any screen time, if any, and not play videogames until… I couldn’t even fathom when. Of course it all had to do with his quantity of screen-time I’m sure, but the idea of ANY became scary to me nonetheless. Obviously I’ve loosened up a bit, because my life is full of video-game-playing, TV-watching kids who are awesomely creative :)

Three things could entice my little king of Grand Theft Auto and Spongebob Squarepants: baking projects, water balloons, and bean bags. Each classroom had a set of 26 beanbags stitched with the letters of the alphabet. They always seemed like a simple thing, but I could get my little brood of five and six year olds to do ANYTHING if we were using those beanbags – word games, physical activity, making up stories, sitting through a long storybook while squishing them around, calmed down by the feel of beans trickling through the fabric in their fingers – Any. Thing. Inevitably I would have to take them away because they’d morphed from beanbags into grenades and landmines (yes, landmines), but it was always fun while it lasted.

I was cleaning out some EE stuff at my parents’ house last summer and filed away in my brain the idea of making a set of alphabet beanbags for Hazel when she is older. When I was fondling this red and white polkadotted fabric in JoAnn’s a month or so ago, I was trying to come up with something for her for Valentine’s day involving little fabric hearts. Little soft hearts numbered 1 – 10? Spelling out her name? She’s not really into soft toys and never has been, so I decided to make her some beanbags instead. I still wasn’t sure what to put on them, and then coming across a letter-stamping project in Handmade Home made me decide to simply stamp a few patches (made from an old white tshirt) with some of her loves and stitch them to the hearts. I decided on six and have been working on them, and a drawstring bag to hold them, for most of the afternoon: Mama, Papa, Pears, Dogs, Music & Books. My bobbin ran out 3/4 of the way through topstitching the last heart, which was my cue to take a break and blog the progress. Tonight I’ll fill them with beans and stitch up the holes.

I think they are going to be super-cute and I hope she likes them. I also hope that at age five she doesn’t even know what a landmine is. Just sayin’.