Assembly Required

Avery's 3rd birthday party was the birthday of puzzles, educational toys, etc.  Avery's 4th birthday party?  This was the party of "assembly required" gifts.  You may not know this about me, but I actually love these projects.  I am that girl who will read the instructions from beginning to end and I love following them each step of the way.  So, I was actually OK with the assembly of most of these.  However, one thing that I did find is that a 4 year old and a 2 year old also love these projects and while it is great that they wanted to be involved, there are really very few things that they are actually capable of doing during assembly, which resulted in all projects taking twice as long as they should have. 

Another thing that I realized while assembling these things?  Apparently, I have a type A personality - who knew????  I tried so hard to allow for the kids to be creative, specifically while building this...

BUT, if I let them just build it the way that they wanted to and not follow the directions, who is to say that the marbles would travel down the path the way that they are supposed to??????  Clearly we can't have haphazard marble rolling!!!  Geesh.

Then, there was this.  I did let Avery and Alex help with screwing in the screws - of course, this led to a meltdown by Al because he thought that he should just be able to hold the electric screw driver himself and that he didn't need my help.  Somehow, "You will probably screw this screw right into your finger and it will hurt" just didn't quite process.  However, "If you don't give that back to Mommy, you will go to timeout" did, so we were able to complete the project.

And, while this wasn't necessarily and "assemble required" type of project, it did involve very careful reading of instructions.  Don't worry - I did let her paint her own beads (although, I have to admit - I bit my tongue on more than one occasion because WHY would you combine more than one color on one side of a bead to the point where the color is now brown?????).

And, the mother of all "assembly required" projects....

This would be the trampoline that Aunt Lexi and Uncle Will got for Avery for her bday.  Unfortunately for her, I had a friend over one afternoon for a play date and enlisted her help in putting this puppy together.  Whey didn't I ask my husband to help me, you ask?  Because, he would have called Earl. And, that is just embarrassing.  Anyway - it was put together and both kids love it.  Although, I will say that we found out the hard way that the bar that you see? Yeah - that isn't really meant for 4 year olds to be doing gymnastics tricks on.  We realized this as Avery catapulted over the thing and landed face first on the floor.  She hasn't touched the bar since.  Alex on the other hand, grabs ahold of the thing and bounces around like a mad man. 

Now for the neverending question - where are we going to store all of these things while not being used?  I think and addition is in order! Earle?????