First stringing and sponging activities

I finally got Nugget the new activities she's been asking for. Unfortunately, I introduced these activities the morning that she first started to suffer from a nasty stomach bug. So she hasn't had much patience for them yet, although she's tried them a few times.

One was a simple wooden puzzle of three pieces -- a leaf, a squirrel, and a nut -- that fit inside one another. I picked it and two others (a chicken and her hens and a pig and piglets) at a thrift store. These are a different type of puzzle than Nugget's used to, and she still hasn't quite worked it out.

The second is her first stringing activity. I used rigatoni pasta (dyed with food coloring) and pipe cleaners. To keep the pasta from sliding off, I twisted a wooden bead to one end.


She's gone back to this one a few times, even while sick, so I think it might be a keeper.

Another attempt to provide sick-toddler entertainment saw me bringing bowls of water onto our lanai. Nugget wanted to float her turtles, but I also introduced her to moving water with a sponge. She gave it a shot a few times...


... but it quickly devolved into squeezing the water onto the ground and eventually pouring out the bowls.


It's very un-Montessori to do it so messily, but when the kid is so sick and grumpy that even smiling at her wrong sends her into a tizzy, correcting her few minutes of fun is the last thing I'm going to do.