Stickers

Not to long ago, I stumbled upon the realization that my child loves stickers. I'm pretty sure this happened when we were at "become a certified elf" day at the mall in December. They had buckets of stickers that you could decorate your elf hat with and I'm going to assume Jude could have spent the entire day thumbing through the buckets sticking the same foam stickers on his hat without ever getting bored. I'm not going to pretend that my kid is the first kid in the history of man to discover stickers and think they are pretty cool - but none-the-less, he loves them.

While at the Learning Express I had picked up a book of letter stickers in different colors, and designs and occasionally bring them out for Jude to play with. He's totally into it, and again, it's a great little 'learning trick'. I'll say the letter as I hand him the sticker and he'll put it on the page I've given him in no logical order at all - usually piled on top of each other. As with the coloring we do where I label things - I'm not sure if he's really 'getting it', but even if he picks up one thing, it's enough for me. I don't use these very often though, because they're a bit more consumable than some of the other stuff I've gotten. The more I do it, the more I have to buy - and I don't want to head back to the store once a week - so we spread it out.

Well, within the past week, I've pulled all of my scrapbooking supplies out in an effort to complete 2010 in photos (I'm currently through May!). Well, with these boxes of supplies are, of course, stickers and all sorts of decorative objects that resemble stickers - but of course are a bit more expensive than your standard mellisa and doug book of letters. Thus far I've had to root through my box of stickers for any that I know I won't be using (and quite frankly I'm not sure how I acquired in the first place) - like the puffy valor kittens and sparkling spidermans - and donate them to the Jude fund. It's pretty amazing how entertaining stickers are to a 21 month old. It's nothing for him to be transfixed on them for 45 minutes to an hour. Of course, the first 20 minutes is me taking them off the sheets so that he can place each of them on his shirt... and then the next 30+ minutes he's taking them from his shirt and putting them on his table, or the paper and then moving them from paper to table or vice versa.

At first I was disappointed in the shear waste of it, but really he's totally fine-tuning those little fingers of his! Watching him spend 30 seconds trying to figure out how to get this itty bitty piece of spiderman's foot off of his index finger is hands down one of the cutest things I've seen. Plus, they were headed towards the trash/donation pile soon anyway...

The worst part though? scratching them off the wood floors... his table... furniture... you name it.