Dress Up Fun

Like most children, Max and Susannah enjoy playing dress up.  My sitter has some dress up clothes at her place during the school year and so at the beginning of the summer I set out to create an inexpensive collection of dress up clothes for the kids to play with.

My source for much of my dress up supplies was the $1 bin at Target.  Above Susannah is wearing a purple grass skirt and some fairy wings, both purchased for a $1.  I bought a green grass skirt that Max has also played with.  I won't post a picture of that because his Daddy probably wouldn't like it.

Pirates are much more manly than fairies. 

For a $1, I got Max a pirate set.  In addition to the patch, it came with a stick-on mustache and a clip-on earring.  I quickly decided that he was too little for the latter two items and so I put them away as they screamed choking hazard.

Going along with the islands theme, I bought three flower leis at the Dollar Store for, shockingly, a $1. 

One rainy day we decided to watch Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee while wearing paper crowns.  I had a ton of these left over from an event I was involved in before school let out.  We have so many that we may be having a Kings and Queens birthday party come January.

What else is in our dress up bin? Eight plastic bracelets I got from the Michaels' dollar bin. We also have two headbands with animal ears on them, one with rabbit ears and one with bear ears. I keep it all in a plastic bin I got from the Dollar Store.

This is an obviously evolving collection, but I think we've made a good start.  Every week I look for new additions in the Target dollar bin (like I need another reason to shop at Target).

This blog will go silent again, likely for the next week, as the Bulldog Twins are headed out of town this afternoon and this weekend Mommy gets to go on a trip all by herself. 

Pet Parade

Sorry for the silence last week.  We were on vacation which is always on the top of my list of things to do.

Now that we're home, I'm back to finding things to occupy our time in a fun and creative way.  One of the things I noticed when we got home was that we were low on dog food.  In an effort to ensure our best friend didn't starve, we set off to our local pet store to buy more.

Now, we could have just gone in, gotten the food, and left.  However, that would have taken less time than it takes to get the stroller set up and both kids out of the car and into it.  If I'm going to get everyone out, then we might as well find something fun to do.  So we decided to go on a pet parade around the store.

First stop:  the fish.

This definitely reminded me of our trip to the Aquarium.  There were several rows of tanks stacked on top of one another, so even from the stroller the kids could see all of the fish really well.  We're still working on the word "fish". 

Next, we looked at the cats.  This store works with local rescue organizations to find good homes for pets.  The dogs come in on the weekends, but there are some cats there all the time.  The twins have only recently begun to learn the difference between cats and dogs.  This is probably because we have a dog at home and the two are similar.  My parents have cats, so this began the road to learning the difference.

This cat's name was Pixie and she took a liking to us.  Susannah is pointing to her and saying "CAT!".  Were I not allergic to cats, we might have considered taking her home.

Our next stop was the gerbils/hamsters.  They were mostly napping in their pink plastic houses, so we didn't stay here long because at the end of the aisle, a guy had a store employee pulling out a snake.  We didn't take pictures of this (or get too close) because I figured it would be slightly creepy to start taking pictures of random strangers.  (As if I didn't already look weird enough taking pictures in PetSmart.)

After pulling around the corner from the snake, we found the birds.  The birds were actually awake and flying around which yielded much interest.  I also attempted to teach them the word "bird".  (Keep in mind this whole time I'm walking around the store like an idiot going " say bird", "cat", "What sound does a bird make?"  Anybody who didn't see I was with two one-year-olds probably thought I was nuts.)

Last stop before getting the item we came in for was the dog grooming area.  This dog was staying pretty still and didn't seem to mind if we stared through the window at him.

Just because you have kids doesn't mean that you don't have things to do.  I try to incorporate the kids as much as possible and make every task fun.  And because one of my favorite things to do is shop, it's pretty important that the kids are okay doing it.

Plus, when you get home with your dog food, you have another toy.  What's not to enjoy?