Mama's Little Helper

When my little buddy had been walking a month or two, he started trying  to do everything I did.  He especially liked sweeping, but such a long handle being waved around by someone without much fine motor control was a bit hazardous.  Luckily I had a small broom with an aluminum handle that I cut down with a bow-saw and popped the plastic top back on to the cut piece.  Perfect!  We jazzed it up with some stickers and my little buddy was just tickled.  He still gets it out frequently and helps me "seep".  Lately he's been wanting to help me "keen" the bathroom and dust, so I thought I'd encourage this while he was still small enough to think it is fun.  (He's about 20 months old now).  Maybe I'm the one that needs to look for the fun in cleaning...
I made this little kit for him using mostly dollar store items, and things from around the house. He helped me stick stickers on everything, and we are good to go!  I haul around my cleaning supplies in a tote, so I found a basket he could use to carry everything-and it doubles as a place to keep his cleaning things when he's not playing with them.  I included a microfiber rag, scrub brush, dustpan, duster, a few sponges, and  a squirt bottle with a little water in it.

 
We'll see how the water bottle goes-it might be too tempting to squirt everything, but so far my buddy is pretty good about using things like this the way I show him.  The only problem I've had so far is with the dust pan.  He was "helping" me cook the other day and I didn't see him take a measuring cup and dip it in the sugar.  That went mostly on the floor as he went to dump it in the bowl.  I helped him use his dust pan to clean it up, and unfortunately it must have been way too much fun, because he now tries to head for the sugar when he has the dustpan.  I'm thinking I'll get out some paper punch dots for him to sweep up, or some pom poms until the sugar is forgotten.


I tried using a technique to transfer printed images to wood using acetone as described in this tutorial, but had limited success.  I ended up having to go over the image with ink and paint before I was happy with it.  Too bad, I was hoping it would work better, I have a lot of projects where I'd like to transfer my art to wood but it seems like it might be easier to just work on the wood. If any of you have a better technique I'd love to hear about it!

Here you can see how it turned out.  In the photo I'd started going over the lettering with a very fine-tipped permanent ink pen-a thicker one bled into the wood.