A couple months ago I was perusing Pinterest and came across an idea that I knew I wanted to try right away. It was the idea of making "Busy Bags" for my kids.. basically, small activities that are kept in gallon-sized freezer bags. They are ready to "grab and go" whenever we are heading out the door to a place where my kids need to be quiet (and still) for a period of time. They are perfect for Church, waiting rooms, etc. Some activities are even good for car rides, too.
(Let me just insert here that I really love Pinterest because it has given me so many great ideas. Recipe ideas, project ideas, decorating ideas, gift ideas... the list is endless. And I have actually been doing many of the things I've pinned, so I consider it successful in that way. I also dislike Pinterest, because now I feel like everything I see in peoples' houses, I think "oh yeah I saw that on Pinterest". Nothing is "new" anymore. Oh well. I love it more than I hate it, so I'm going to keep using it. You can see my boards here.)
Anyway. The busy bags. A great idea, I knew I had to do it. However, I really hate going out and buying tons of little things to make tons of little activity bags, because I'm always left with lots of extra materials that I will probably never use. And then, I saw a blog post about a Busy Bag Swap, and I knew it was the solution to my problem. Basically, you gather a group of friends together and each person chooses which busy bag they want to create. Then, you make your busy bag X number of times (one for each person in your group), and then you all get together and "swap" your busy bags, so everyone has one of each.
So, in early September I sent out an email to the girls in my ward to see who wanted to participate. I wanted to get at least a dozen people to do it, because I wanted at least that many busy bags. I really don't know how many people I originally invited, but about 2/3 of them responded that they were interested. Final head count? 27 people!
We toyed with the idea of breaking into two groups, but in the end people said they didn't mind making 27 bags, and getting 27 bags in return. I think that looking back, a lot of them would have changed their minds about that one, but it's done now! I worked on mine a lot during General Conference and movie nights with Garrett. It didn't take too much time, and I probably spent about $30-$35 total.
So, last Thursday we had our "Busy Bag Swap", where we got together and showed off what we had made, and handed out our bags to everyone. It was a lot of fun seeing what everyone had created, and it was even more fun going home with more than 25 little activities for my kids! There are activities for learning colors, numbers, letters, shapes, fine motor skills, counting, puzzles, memory games, go fish games, tic tac toe, a lacing activity, games with magnets, games with beads and tiny pom poms and buttons and pipe cleaners and foam shapes.... so many to choose from. You can see many of the activities in the Busy Bag link above, and we also had several more that people found other places online.
It was a really fun night (we were missing a handful of people, but we knew there was no way we could get all of us together at once. Everyone's husband has such a crazy schedule, we just take what we can get). We still had a good turnout (picture above), and it was fun to have a little "girls' night". Usually when any of us are together we are chasing our kids around at the park or the pool, so it was nice to just sit and have adult conversations for a few hours.
1 comments:
Great idea...looks like everyone had fun!
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