Thank God for Color Wonder

Lately, Katie Anne's obsession has become ink pens and paper. She LOVES to try and "write" with ink pens on little pads of paper. The longest this task has kept her occupied was forty-five minutes... the only reason she stopped (and she stopped with protest) was because I couldn't take the stress of keeping her from writing all over herself or the house or stabbing herself in the eye with the pen!

She is not satisfied with a pencil, and she knows when the pen's cap is on or it isn't clicked into the writing position... she has figured out how to click the ink pen so it will write. (There goes distraction #1.) She is marginally satisfied with crayons, but she can't really press down hard enough to get them to make a mark, so she gets frustrated. She doesn't really like to write on one piece of paper... she prefers a tiny notepad. My only option for the last couple of days has been to keep all ink pens/little notepads out of her sight, because seeing one means we have to write with it!

Well, I bought two possible pen substitutes at Target on Saturday. One was a little Magna- Doodle... we tried it Saturday night at Moore's Market for dinner, and we tried it again yesterday. She likes it okay, and she can make marks on the Magna- Doodle's surface, but the string that attaches the pen frustrates her. I know that, if I cut the string, we will never find the little pen again. So...

Option #2 was a Color Wonder marker set, complete with notepad (hooray) and 6 markers in various colors. Yes, I know the age suggestion is 3+, but we're going with what we've got here and just using it under supervision. Well, we tried this tonight while I was cooking dinner, and she LOVED it! Sure, there was a little bit of marker tasting and hair coloring and highchair coloring and dog head coloring, but... COLOR WONDER IS TRULY A WONDER! It does not color on anything except the Color Wonder pad! She colored for probably twenty minutes. So, here are some pictures of our budding little Picasso at work. Well, actually she's a little more Jackson Pollack at this point, but she's still doing great for 14 months!