Chicka Chicka Mama: 365: Floral Design Day

February 28 is Floral Design Day. Jude and I got Valentine's Day flowers from our new friends, Jordan and Jed, so I decided to epicycle them for today's project.

A couple of days ago, I started pressing the flowers for this activity. I had never pressed flowers before and had next to no idea how long it took. I realized last night that I was roughly 3 weeks from having dried flowers, so I improvised. I took out my trusty laminator and laminated the flat flowers. They will likely not last too long because some air got trapped in the seal, but they work for now and are beautiful to look at. I may try to laminate flattened fake flowers to play with more longterm.

I was inspired by a few Instagram moms to use contact paper to play, so I hung some up on the side of the shelf. I also put out the laminated flowers on the floor near it with the exception of one that I hung to show Jude what the paper was for. Jude was across the room when I set it up and the bright colors of the flowers served as a fun invitation to play and he crawled right over when he saw it.

Jude caught on pretty quickly that the paper was sticky. I talked him through the process of putting a flower on and taking a flower off, and then I set him free to play how he wanted. He chose to chew on the laminate and then start hanging flowers.

I am going to start brainstorming more ways to play with contact paper because it was a lot of fun for both of us. The best part about the activity is that I'm able to keep it up for a bit because everything is laminated.