Sock puppets

Oh boy.

Yesterday I hit up Borders. I love bookstores. L O V E love them. I prefer to visit them solo. Since both my kids touch and comment on everything a straightforward visit to a book store (or book section if we are referring to our life in Germany) is often stretched into a minimum of an hour. Allowed to do this sort of errand solo, I can be out in as little as two minutes if I know the store layout and there isn't a long line.

It's been at least two and a half years since I've been in a proper bookstore, so when I entered the mecca that is Borders yesterday and I heard angel harps and hallelujah music in my head, I assumed it wasn't the voices in my head bothering me again and rather a sort of homecoming from the literary gods.

Literary gods: Welcome back, my child. It's good to have you home again.
Me: Oh. Oh! (Wiping away some pesky eye wetness) It's been so long. I wasn't sure you would remember me.
Literary gods: Bargain books at your 11:00. Go my child.

And then reality comes crashing down as S, who is even more of a book lover than T is, shouts "Paper! Dora! Pretty!" And she takes off to -- well, I'm not exactly sure where she was headed. We had a..umm....diaper situation to handle first so I lure her into the bathroom under the pretense of wondering if the bathroom was decorated like Dora's room. (It wasn't). But sometimes you have to pull out the big guns.

Once we were finished in the bathroom, we headed to the kids section. It turns out that Borders actually has story time on Wednesdays at 10 am. This could be dangerous for me or at least for our budget. I was impressed at the amount of books just in the kids section. I probably had not paid much attention before, but there were all sorts of games and activities you could buy as well. Some of them tied into children's books like 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, and some just looked like really fun things to do. Out of this enormous pile of choices I chose some Little Critter books, a Dora, and a Diego book for the kids plus a sock puppet kit. Who doesn't like sock puppets?!?!? Who doesn't like making sock puppets!!?!?

Fast forward to after T gets home from school and we get lunch and clean up out of the way. T was so excited to see the sock puppet kit. I was excited to open it and see an instruction book. I was not excited to see glue that was easy to open and dispense. At least there wasn't glitter and if I'd been paying attention when I bought the kit, I would have seen that there was glue inside since it said so right there on the front of the box. Contains: Glue. And sock puppet supplies. And by 'supplies' they meant eyes, pom poms, pipe cleaners, felt sheets, two colors of yarn, and four socks. Hmmmm. I'll be honest, I was expecting more. I was thinking these would be pre made kits that you'd then put together. I may be marginally crafty, but I can not draw, cut, or sew straight. This isn't looking good. The instruction book was nice, but it assumed you already had experience with sock puppeting because some of the advanced puppets were not given advanced instructions, or any instructions really. And some of the advanced stuff was neat!

Lucky for me, the kids are young enough and not ocd enough that the details didn't really matter. Both of them wanted to make a dog puppet. I can handle that. We cut out ears and tongues and then glued them on with the eyes and pom pom noses. I even made a little yarn hair for S's puppy. We let them dry for a couple hours and then voila! Time to play. Except T didn't like the way the tongue of his puppy looked once he put his hand in the sock so we had to redo it. Fair enough. S's puppy hair fell off almost right away, so I'm guessing that will need to be sewn on which means it will be a while. I don't have the right needles or thread for that. We played with S's puppy while T's cosmetically surgery altered puppy recovered. Then S's pups nose fell off. Oh Dr. 90210 - where are you when I need you? And how much is your fee for sock puppets? From there the sock puppets had an even rougher afternoon...losing all of their features at some point. I'd say we didn't use enough glue, but considering that I wiped glue off of everything at least once, I don't think that's true either.

Always good about making lemonade out of lemons (especially when destruction was involved), the kids settled for unravelling the yarn and tying it to all of the downstairs door knobs. I didn't have an issue with that until I had to go to the bathroom, and had to negotiate through a maze reminiscent of that Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta Jones movie about the art thieves. After a near decapitation and loud protests that I needed to go under and over the strings versus breaking through them like a game of Red Rover, I ordered the strings removed from the doorknobs. Because, you know, I'm a party pooper like that. And it was time for R to come home. It just wouldn't be fair to leave all that up and not give him any warning about it. It would have been hilarious (to me), but not fair.

So, next time I'm in craft store range I'm going to pick up an appropriate needle and thread and we'll try the whole sock puppet thing again.