“Hey, Mom! I Wanna Do a Projick!”

Molly loves a good craft projick (project) and is constantly trying to rope me into doing one for with her. Hey, I’m as crafty as the next gal and I really don’t mind but somehow it seems that even if Molly can do the project by herself, I end up doing the lion’s share of the work with the set up, material prep, instructions and clean up.

And Molly hardly ever picks a project that she can do independently, although there are plenty in the craft cabinet.      No, she wants the seriously detailed, difficult projects.

In addition, she always wants to do them at the most inopportune times. Like when I am cooking dinner, or paying the bills.

Oh, I understand what she is doing. She sees me not paying attention to her for 4.5 seconds and remedies the situation by roping me into something that puts 100% of the focus back on her. I’m onto her little plan, but somehow she sucks me in every single time.

Here is one of Molly’s favorite projicks….Perler Beads:These were lovingly given to Molly on her birthday by her sweet friend Avery and her evil equally sweet mother Christine. Just look at them. A five-year-old with teeny tiny beads. I can’t imagine how anything could go wrong with this.

So what you do is take these teeny tiny beads and put them on teeny-tiny pegs to form a design. You do this with teeny tiny tweezers.

You also have to follow a complicated pattern to make the design come out correctly. Well, you don’t actually have to follow a pattern but the ones on the box look so cool that you would be a loser parent if you could not help your five-year-old replicate the design.

Molly has enough patience to place about 20 beads onto the pegboard pattern.

And then she is content to rummage through the beads looking for the correct colors….

while you-know-who finishes the projick.

After about 10 minutes of bead hunting, even this becomes boring and Molly begins to lose interest.So, she wanders around the house playing with other toys and occasionally checks in with me to make sure that I am still working.

Finally I am finished placing all of the teeny tiny bead on the teeny tiny pegs and I call Molly over to inspect my work. 

She jumps for joy….which causes about 20 or so teeny tiny beads to fall off of their respective pegs. So I reapply.

Then I must use the iron to melt the beads so that they all stick together in one big beady design. Another step that Molly cannot do. You know, the whole hot iron thing.

While I’m busy ironing beads Molly grabs my camera and begins to take pictures of herself. Wonder where she learned that???

After the design is ironed/melted it must be placed in the freezer (next to the pumpkin muffins we made during a different projick), so that it can cool down quickly because five-year-olds don’t like to wait for anything.

Soon enough the project is done.

And Molly horses around with it.

Molly poses with all of the Perler Bead projects that I she has done this far.

And I go clean up the mess. I know, I know. SHE should be the one cleaning it up, but the teeny tiny beads need to be transferred from the bowl we had them in while we were doing the project back into a Ziploc bag for storage. Would you trust your five-year-old to do that?

I didn’t think so.