Pintrest

I resisted joining Pintrest for a long time.   The reason is that I knew it had a very good possibility of getting me addicted and sucking even more precious time then I have.  Facebook has done it and continues to do it despite my near hatred of it.  I suppose that's what addiction is-doing something over and over and hating it afterwards, huh?  Anyway, I finally did join pintrest a few months ago.  My reason was that I had a lot of recipe boxes on line on various sites and pintrest was a great way to organize them all.  While I've been on it, my two main intrests are cooking/recipes and kid crafts.  I have to say, Pintrest has been great for me!  I'm able to keep my pinning and browsing of pins under control.  I don't think I even go on once a day at this point.  The main reason I'm able to keep it under control is that 1. I haven't discovered the addiction of other people's boards.  I've looked at maybe 2 friends (total) boards.  I just haven't done it.  That, I'm sure, takes up a lot of time.  2.  I prefer, a lot, the moblie version of pintrest.  That means I usually only look on pintrest while Libby is nursing or when I finally get free time to play with the Kindle at the end of the day.  So I'm very grateful that, so far, I haven't been sucked in too badly.

Now on to how it's helped us!  Anne started school about 3 weeks ago.  I used to do a TON of crafts with her.  Even after Jamie was born we did lots and lots of crafts.  We kept it up until 2 years ago when I got pregnant with Libby.  Being pregnant usually means only necessary things get done for 9 months.  Crafting with a 4 year old and 1 year old didn't meet those requirements.  Then Libby was born and having 3 kids also meant that only necessary things get done.  My standards went from Anne in an adorable outfit, bathed, teeth brushed and hair styled perfectly to being grateful if we even arrived at our destination-way more times then not in dirty clothes and with smelly kids.  I have three kids.  My life is busy.  I've accepted it.  So now that Anne is at school and I just have the 2 kids home I am able to do start doing things with Jamie again.  Pintrest has helped me find a lot of really fun things to do with him.  We spent 2 weeks doing letter sheets.  (And by the way-Jamie is super smart.  He has self taught himself every single letter-upper and lower case!  Anne didn't know that til 4 year old preschool and even in Kindergarten there were maybe 2 letters she struggled with.)  This week we are going to start up on number sheets.  We've also started doing books and crafts.  I've been trying once a week to read him a story and do a craft with it.  Fortunately Pintrest has me set for a minimum of 6 months on that one!  Here are 2 of the fruits of my Pintrest browsings:

I made the kids some tracks out of masking tape on the carpet.  They played with it for a short time when I did it and haven't played with it much since.  But it's there and Jamie has gone over and played with it by himself and likes it.  Plus I spent an hour with the kids playing with it so that's a success by itself.

This is one of our book and crafts we've done.  Read the Trashy Town book and made a garbage truck.  Jamie and I cut out pictures of "trash" (ie, just a collage) to glue to the truck. 

So thank you Pintrest!  So far you've been good to me and my family!