Holiday Hack: Slacker Gift Wrap

Wrapping Giant Gifts:
At my friend Karen's house I noticed a giant box clearly labeled playhouse next to the tree with a couple squares of gift wrap on it.

I must have looked perplexed because Karen said, "All you have to do is cover all the pictures."

That's right- our toddlers can't read yet! Pure genius!

Plus, it minimizes paper use/waste.

If your box is covered with photos, or you want full coverage merely for aesthetics- wrap the oversized box or item in a tablecloth, blanket, or bed sheet and secure it with ribbon, yarn, string, and/or safety pins.

Wrapping Very Small Gifts:
Back in the olden days, my brother and I (heavily financed by Mom) bought Dad a pricey video club membership.

If you're saying "Bought a video membership?" you have forfeited your right to sing along with Time-Life commercials relating to the 80s.

It was essentially a paper business card with my Dad's name written on it- by hand. It entitled us to rent any of their 50 or so videos at additional cost. We were soooo proud of our gift- it was a shame that it was so small that it could even get lost in his stocking.

So we put it in a wooden caboose Dad built for our train set. And we wrapped that in a big box. And we wrapped that big box in a giant box filled with wadded up newspaper from the recycling shelf. And that- we could wrap with a sheet.

And as a holiday gift to everyone, we'd like to share a favorite (and timely) Jones household word:

scurryfunge (we heard it attributed to New England, but have no idea if this is accurate)- a hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor coming and the time she knocks on the door. (Informal English)

We tend to use this word to describe the frantic last minute cleaning I'm avoiding right now.

Happy Holidays!

Holiday Hack: Toddler-friendly Ornaments

Jim and I didn't own a Christmas tree the first year of our married life. His mom thought that was a travesty and bought us a 2' tall artificial tree. This little tree was our primary tree for years. We liked to load it down with comically large ornaments or decorate it with only lights and keep it on the bathroom counter (I smirk to think of this, even though I have no idea why).

At some point we bought a 6' artificial tree which we suspect is made of plastic and standard grade pipe cleaners. I'm sure we got it on clearance. Its weak boughs can't support an ornament of much weight. Every year we get motivated enough to put it up (which is something like 1:3) we swear we will buy a new one next year.

Ranger LOVES holiday lights. We put the big tree up last year without ornaments. We added a foot tapper on/off switch to our tree on the recommendation of Parent Hacks- and he loves controlling the lights.

As we're not very invested in tradition, we decided to try this year to make the decorations as toddler-friendly as possible.

When a friend mentioned that he was wiring all his gaming figurines to hang as holiday decorations, it struck me that we might not need ornaments or wire ornament hangers at all. With yarn or ribbon and the versatile lark's head knot almost anything can become an ornament (and you can jettison those silly wire ornament hangers for good).

Thus, the first Baby Toolkit video was born! Learn to make a lark's head knot:


Sorry about the off-screen portions, I shot the video alone while Ranger napped, so there was no time for a retake. I promise I'll do better with framing in future videos, but I will probably always sound like total tool.

We hung our lighted tree primarily with Barrel-of-Monkeys monkeys (again, Parent Hacks inspired) and linking letters. We also put up some other small toys that Ranger generally tends to ignore most of the time. We didn't put anything very tempting on the tree because we didn't want to torture the kid or inspire him to take up indoor tree climbing.

When it's time to put the tree in the closet, I'm getting all the old ornaments out. The ones without sentimental value (which is most of them) are headed to a local thrift shop.

Recast toys or other objects you already own as ornaments reduces decorating costs and required storage space for those other 11 months of the year.

There will be no more talk of replacing the tree. It finally looks like it actually belongs in our house.

Clear Unsightly Blemishes: the Case of the Ballpoint Baby Doll

Blogging makes me weirder. My friend told me her son drew all over her childhood baby doll with a pen, and my first response was to excitedly ask "Could I borrow the doll?" I did have a legitimate reason for asking- we're testing a permanent ink remover for review and I had not yet tried it on a doll.

So wee Elizabeth came to visit (I can't say young Elizabeth as she's almost as old as I am). The young artist in residence had tattooed her with a giveaway ballpoint pen. He didn't just doodle a image here or there, we're talking full-pathology facial tattoos including eyelids (seriously, back away slowly from anyone with these), skull tattoos, leg tattoos, and marks on the hands and soles of the feet resembling stigmata.

I figured the inexpensive ink didn't have a chance against my long list of cleaning ideas. My friend's husband had tried a magic eraser which yielded no results.

The permanent ink remover did absolutely nothing against the ink. Across a week, I tried almost everything in my normal stain-removal arsenal (I skipped a couple things that seemed potentially damaging to the plastic/vinyl):

• baking soda paste
• 409
• rubbing alcohol
• vegetable oil
• Murphy's oil soap
  
• Simple Green
• dishsoap
• GoJo handsoap with pumice
• toothpaste
• CarpetAid+
• waterless hand cleaner (works well on grease stains)
• non-acetone nail polish remover
• adhesive remover
  
• evaporated milk (works like a charm lifting recent ink stains out of fabrics)

The ink's dye soaked deeply into the plastic, staining it so that no amount of surface scrubbing would remove it. Prolonged scrubbing with simple green could lighten it about 50-60% but that did little to improve the doll's overall appearance.

I trolled the Internet for answers and came up with one so insane I would normally have passed it up. Next thing I knew I was buying 10% benzyl peroxide acne cream for a doll. A toy collectors' forum suggested that acne cream and sunlight could remove the ink stains without bleaching the doll's skintone or removing painted accents.

On an overcast afternoon, I smeared a tiny bit on a test patch and left Elizabeth on our dining room table for the last hour and a half of sunlight. Having been disappointed by every other test, I didn't expect much from this solution with or without sunlight. When I checked Elizabeth, the test spot was entirely free of ink stains. Her plastic seemed otherwise unaltered by the cream.

Elizabeth spent yesterday sunbathing in the dining room. The darkest stains took around 4 hours of bright sunlight to disappear. Many of the lighter stains were gone in 2 hours.

The top of her head was shadowed by her body, so I used a small regular mirror (don't use a magnifying one for this!) and bounced sunlight to the top of her head while the rest of her graffitied body got full sun. It worked on the same timeline as direct sun exposure. Later, I moved the mirror to give additional illumination to her curving hands. The reflected light could reach some frequently shadowed places.

Elizabeth sat down for a quick photo shoot this morning before returning home.

Moral of the story? Don't leave pens unattended around toddlers -or- be very cautious about wearing acne cream in direct sunlight.

***This is the independent opinion of Baby Toolkit. We have no affiliations with acne cream manufacturers. We are not chemists, skin care experts, nor professional cleaners, so take everything we say here with a grain of salt. (c) Baby Toolkit, 2007- all rights reserved.

Booster Seat Bonus

Some hacks exist almost invisibly once implemented. When the delivery man came to install our new fridge, he (also a parent of a toddler) commented on how we installed our son's booster seat to our kitchen chair.

So here's our simple way to keep our wooden chair goop free and minimize scratches and other marring from the booster and its straps:

Materials: 1 standard bath towel, two safety pins, chair, and booster seat. (If you're booster seat shopping, we LOVE our Fisher Price booster seat. See our seat comparison for more information.)

Step 1: Find standard size bath towel (ducks not required, but bonus points for any waterfowl). Lay towel over chair so seat is fully covered and there are a few surplus inches overhanging front edge of the seat.

Step 2: Safety pin the rest of the towel (about 1/4 of the total length) behind the chair. I used brass safety pins that don't rust, but the normal kind will probably suffice unless you hose your child down in their booster seat (in which case you're probably not using a wooden chair to begin with).


Step 3: Fasten booster to chair normally. When the towel shows signs of peach yogurt and/or pureed yams, just remove the safety pins and machine wash.

Voila! Another Jones secret revealed. You are now one step closer to world domination