Time For A Little Privacy

[Anna is watching me get toweled off after my shower this morning.]

Anna (pointing at one of my breasts): I like that boobie best.

Me: Uh, why?

Anna: It is smaller. It is the little baby boobie.

Art Project for You Fellow Lazy Mothers

(No. This isn't the art project. You wish.)

Those enticing squished chocolate bugs are actually the inspiration for the art project.

One day, I noticed that Anna had gotten into my stash of chocolate and was contentedly playing with the chocolate bugs. She played with those things for hours. There was much chocolate bug drama when she realized that they were melting in her hands. Oh how she wished that her chocolate bugs could be a permanent fixture in her life.

Aha! thought my little mommy brain, which is both extraordinarily lazy and constantly looking for things to occupy the child's time and energy. We shall make bugs.

Bug Magnets


Buy some little round wooden halves at your local craft store. Find an old towel. Let your child paint the wood with various colors of acrylic paint. It will probably take two coats. (Here's a trick of mine for paint coverage.... add a tiny squirt or two of white paint to your paint color of choice. It will add opacity (and less needed coats), without diminishing the color very much. Not too much or you will get a pastel.) Force the child to not touch the paint until it dries. Or let them. Whatever. It doesn't really matter. It's not like this art project is going to end up in the Louvre.


Now you paint the little faces and stripes on the bugs, if your child doesn't have a steady brush hand. Let the child paint the spots and the eyeballs. Let the bugs dry.


Take the bugs outside to the sidewalk and spray them with some clear acrylic gloss. A good renter would probably put newspaper under the bugs. Let the bugs dry. (You can skip this step if you don't care about chipped paint. And you probably don't. I'm just a glosser.)



By this time, your child will have lost interest in the project and have wandered off to go watch Spongebob Squarepants. Take out your trusty hot glue gun and glue the bugs to the magnets that you also bought at the craft store.



Use your new bug magnets to hang up your favorite irreverent cartoons and torn children's book pages.

Or give them to your child to snoodle while she eats her afternoon Spongebob peanut-butter-on-a-spoon.