They're these little plastic meltable beads that kids create different shapes and designs with using sturdy little peg boards. When your creation is finished, you can iron it together permanently, thus insuring that once it's been melted, your child's masterpiece can last as long as Michelangelo's ceiling and be admired for generations to come.
These are a few of Chloe's latest creations:
It's just the kind of thing girls love and just the kind of thing I disdain. Any toy/craft with tiny pieces tend to make me crazy-though lucky for me these sorts of things somehow have a way of mysteriously disappearing from the house when the kids go off to school.
However, I've recently decided that Perlers are not so bad for TWO reasons:
- Unlike Legos, one pass with a vacuum and the headache's gone.
- It can occupy a bored girl for hours and hours.
During spring break, Chloe and her cousins Madi and Janelle spent many long days making creations of every color, size, and shape. Initially the boys around the house largely ignored the craft fest going on at the kitchen bar. But around day three a strange thing happened.
It happened when the girls decided to take a little "craft break" and went to spend a day or two at Madi and Janelle's house. This left us with a house full of testosterone. To my surprise, I came into the kitchen and found that the boys had commandeered the Perlers and began a massive crafting frenzy of their own.
What did these boys make, you ask? Of course they did not make cute little girl shapes, or silly monkeys, or pink lizards and geometric flowers. Nor did they even try to make sports shapes-which would have been my guess.
What they were making was WAR.
Spread across the bar were dozens of tiny little army people. Blue army guys and green army guys all placed in strategic formations.
...and of course they made little army tanks to go with them:
After CRAFTing and ironing legions of warriors together they raided the house in search of some sort of advanced weaponry to wage a little warfare. Their weapon of choice? Rubber bands.
The onslaught lasted for hours. And for several weeks after, I found the carnage in obscure corners of the house. Poor little green and blue decapitated soldiers who'd gone MIA were later vacuumed up from under couches, rugs, and unlodged from obscure corners about the kitchen.
A day or two later, when the girls came back to resume "Project Perlers", they began to complain that there were no green or blue Perlers to craft with.
"Where'd all the blue and green ones go? They're all gone!" The girls grumbled.
"The boys used them all up." I answered.
"The boys?" they said with scrunched up faces. "The boys don't craft!" they insisted.
Unfortunately for me I don't think I convinced the girls that the boys really did use the Perlers...or an IRON for that matter either. They still think I sat around for two days secretly crafting up green and blue creations. Thanks to the boys, my good craft-free name has been called under question. Lets hope the photos will once again restore my good name.
Tabitha got a "Hama" (as they're called out here) mega-kit for her birthday. I can only assume it was regifted because what kind of cruel parent would give something like that to a five year old?! We've only done it once (a bunny) three months ago and I'm STILL finding little tubular bits of colored plastic all over the house! It's Satan's toy, I tell you!
ReplyDeleteLove that you're not crafty. We're kindred spirits for sure!