Not a Box

Painting the bottom of the car.

In our house, we are big fans of Antoinette Portis' book, Not a Box, which illustrates imaginative play and all of the things that a simple box could be imagined as. In early November, just after Jude was born, I received a huge box from Amazon filled with my subscribe and save shipment of diapers, wipes, etc. While the box was sitting empty in the hallway, Jonah stepped inside it, and an evening of pulling him around the house in his new "car" ensued.  What fun!

To help reinforce the notion that the box could be a car, I suggested that the following day we paint the box and that Jonah should think about the color he wanted to paint it. In the end, he settled for pretty much all of the colors of paint, which was just fine. I moved our rolling cart from the center of the kitchen and rounded up one of our drop cloths to protect the floor. Jonah had a good time using the paint brush and liked walking around the box to work on painting different portions of it. I had a difficult time keeping him from painting the bottom of the box, which I'd placed up on the floor (only really a concern because we were going to drag the complete box around the house as a car again), and Jonah had a hard time concentrating on any one section long enough to cover it completely with paint. Unfortunately, I realized too late that we never got a photo of the "completed" car.

Getting paint off the plate, er, palette.

We had a great time and I wish I could have given Jonah more painting opportunities while I was on leave. It was simply too difficult to know when I might have to drop everything to address Jude's needs, and Jonah is incredibly messy when it comes to paints (and doesn't yet understand our desire to keep paint off of things). That said, I look forward to more and more "not a box" experiences, as Jonah is really beginning to show a lot of imagination in his play (we've taken advantage of this to some degree with his eating as well - last night, he ate spoonfuls of Thomas, Percy, Harold, Tractor Mac, Plane Jane, etc.).

I think I'll move on to this side of the car.

Waiting for Mommy to dole out some more paint.