Bells Are For Ringing

So as I may have mentioned before, last year when I was (unknowingly) pregnant with John Michael and also convinced that I was never going to conceive again I garage saled away every piece of baby gear that had ever annoyed me....so pretty much anything of the light up, noisy and/or plastic variety.  I only kept the things I really loved.  Once I found out that I was indeed being ridiculous and my child bearing years were not in fact behind me, I didn't regret anything that I had purged and this time around I'm taking a different baby play approach that doesn't involve filling up the house with ugly plastic stuff.

So far it's going well, but feel free to laugh at me if you find me making an emergency run to the nearest Once Upon a Child for a lights and sounds baby distraction device :)

Since I no longer had an activity gym type contraption I went in search of something different and found this really pretty wooden number which unscrews for storage and seems to have unlimited usefulness as both a puppet theater and cave, among other things.  I found mine on ebay for nowhere near what it costs new....mmmmm....I love ebay....

Well clearly a play gym needs dangling toys so I went to work recreating these Montessori bell and ring mobiles that I loved on a much shorter scale (for some reason I didn't think having these hanging from the ceiling would be a good idea in this particular house with these particular children....).  

Things were going fine until I managed to mess up the tension on my sewing machine (see sad pic below) and since I'm just winging this whole I know how to sew thing I had no idea how to fix it and gave up....

I was originally sewing them because I wanted to put a bit of elastic at the top so the baby could have fun tugging at them, but for right now he's just batting at them anyway so I can fix them up later.....and just tying them on was so much faster.....

Don't let this video of his totally underwhelming play session fool you....he really does like the bells....and the sound of bells jingling is music to my ears--did I really just type that?  sorry :)--much more so than our previous version whose song even now just thinking of makes me want to bang my head against the wall......

  

Yay for homemade toys that don't make mommy want to bang her head against the wall!  

Disclaimer:  Of course I don't leave him unattended with ribbons and bells.....I don't leave him unattended anywhere....have you been paying attention to the kind of loving attention his brothers give him?  He wouldn't last five minutes alone on the ground........