My Three Year Old Granddaughter's Help

I just wanted to share with you a little something that is a recent development, and something that I'm enjoying.

Because Dana's children are still young, they haven't quite lost their curiosity enough to not touch and play with things that are not toys. Dana had to move her craft room to my condo almost a year ago. When we saw that we needed more room, I moved out of the master bedroom into the spare one, which surprisingly is quite large enough, and moved the joint craft room into the master bedroom. lol!

Needless to say, Dana is over here whenever she can find the time to craft. At times she has to bring the children with her, and I will spend time with the grandchildren to keep them out of trouble and give Dana some uninterrupted time in the craft room. This isn't always the case, she still gets interrupted at times. But here comes the recent development.

Averi, who just turned three, at times would wander into the craft room showing curiosity, and interest in what we were doing. I used to just leave what I was doing and go out with her to spend time with her and her siblings, leaving Dana in the craft room. But one day I thought, "I wonder if Averi would like to be creative?" So I decided that the next time this happened I would pull her up into my lap, with the direction not to touch, and that she could help me.

She was thrilled the next time I was able to follow up on this opportunity. It turned out that she loves sitting on my lap watching. I gave her scrap pieces of paper or ribbon to play with as she sat in my lap. Eventually, she would make a comment about what I was doing, and we'd talk about it. So the next step was to ask her where she thought I should place something. Half the time she had some good ideas. Finally, I asked if she wanted to help me make an entire card. I wish you could have seen her glowing face and smile.

Here is the first card that we worked on together in it's entirety. She, of course, wanted to work with the color pink.

It was her idea on where we placed the ribbon, and her idea to place the little 'friends' sticker in the center button. She loved to peel off the double sided adhesive backing for me before I attached the layers. I gave her options to choose a stamp from, and she chose the one used here. I even let her ink the stamp with instructions on how to do it without getting messy. It took twice as long to make this simple card with her help, but I would never give up those precious moments just to accomplish the creation of this card faster.

We've done this a couple more times now, and she she really seems to enjoy it. So When her third birthday arrived in August, I put together for her a card making kit with scraps of cutouts I had left over from teaching classes, some stickers that I had around for a while and hadn't used, a few A2 cards with envelopes, some ribbon pieces, and even stamped a few Thank Yous and Happy Birthdays on some Spellbinders die cuts I had collecting in my scraps. I even laced double side tape on some pieces and some ribbons since I know that she knew how to do that.

It was a very simple gift, but she really liked it. A few days later Dana and her sat down, and using up everything I gave her she made up all the cards I'd given her. I now have, sitting proudly in my living room, a Thank You card that she made for me. And, here is the card that my cute little 3 year old granddaughter, Averi, made for me.

Here is a picture of my sweet 3 year old granddaughter. (If you're wondering about her eyes, she just had eye surgery two weeks ago.)

I can hardly wait for the next time we can work together on another creation!

[Edited by Dana to add: The card Avi made for her Omi started out a little simpler than this but since it took awhile to deliver the card to its recipient, she continued to add stickers to it from other cards! A Thank You card created for a different recipient ended up entirely naked except for the sentiment! ;) ]