I robot

We have a backpack from Family Week that we use each week at the library. Anna can fill the thing up with as many books as she wants from the kid’s area. They just have to fit in the bag.

1. It keeps the books in order and easily found for return, keeping the fines down to a minimum.
2. It gives her a quest each week when we attack the various branches around town.

Sometimes she fills it with the board books; sometimes it’s a “whatever” situation and she just starts tossing arbitrary books in the bag. This is how we came up with the “SPACE ART” book from last week. We got home and headed to the living room to check out the books. Tod helped her pick a few to read and the space art book was one. They looked at all the projects and marked the pages that they wanted to do.

One of the pages was making your own robot. She loves her Yo Gabba Gabba and is fond of Plex, the yellow robot overlord of the YG2 crowd. So, I gathered up some recycling and a few art supplies that I just happened to have on hand and we began our experiment in toddler arts n’ crafts. Mind you, I am certified K 12 art, but this was a whole different ball of yarn. While most kids are compliant and just want to make something, Anna had to experiment and stack and restack, and experiment some more and wear my very patience to the ground. Remember, I am used to whiny college students who usually don’t have an idea from the get-go. Anna had 1, 000 ideas and was bound and determined to test them all out.

We finally figured out a basic body and Tod taped it all together for hot gluing later. The robot in the book was silver and covered in foil. I had some silver paint in my studio so I thought we could just paint the thing silver. Didn’t work. So, it ended up being a rather tarnished gold color. We spent yesterday afternoon accessorizing the creature with stickers and bangles.

As any good toddler with two Daddies knows: the only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.

Behold the finished product

While some may protest that little girls shouldn’t be making robots, we’re happy to announce that after the above bot was done, Anna promptly remarked that she wanted to make a Princess Robot. I told her that there had already been a Princess Robot and its name was Princess Di.


But it was prone to crashing.