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I've put together a few rather fancy trucks and toys for the grandkids. But after a trip to a garage sale they came home with a pair of wooden jewelry boxes for their pirate treasure. I few additions of some old hardware and decoupage and we had a real pirate chest. But they didn't have Dabloons...so while they went to the fair grandpa found some checkers and a bunch of large buttons, covered them with GOLD spray paint, and the 4 year old twins came home to real TREASURE.
Their smile and enjoyment made my day well worthwile.
Enjoy out there.

Great idea Gary. We moved this last spring and our new home had a couple of flower gardens sprinkled with glass marbles for accent I guess. I was cleaning up these flower beds and pointed one of the marbles out to my grand childeren telling them they look like buried treasure, kept them busy for hours digging and sifting through the dirt.

Reminds me of the guy who called the sheriff's office to report that his mom had a stash of "Wacky Weed" buried behind the chicken coop.
After they came and dug up the area and found nothing, she called her son and asked what the heck he was thinking. He replied, "Well, you wanted the garden plot dug up, didn't you?"

newportcycle wrote:Great idea Gary. We moved this last spring and our new home had a couple of flower gardens sprinkled with glass marbles for accent I guess. I was cleaning up these flower beds and pointed one of the marbles out to my grand childeren telling them they look like buried treasure, kept them busy for hours digging and sifting through the dirt.

My grandkids still would rather pop bubble wrap then play with the gifts inside.

Our grandkids were here a couple years ago and I took them into the workshop and let them draw out a car on some wood scraps, then I cut it out and added wheels. They played on the floor with them and asked if they could use the scraps in my scrap box. They built a town and roads and they played down there all the time they were here. When they left they picked everything up and put it away They had all those new toys to play with upstairs but wanted the simplest thing to play with. When I was small and we would go to our grandparents my uncle made us cars and trucks out of a popular tree and would cut the wheels from another tree. We played with these behind my grandmothers wood cookstove. That was over 60 years ago.

I remember when I was a kid in the late 60's/early 70's, I lived in Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) - my parents would take us into SF and the obligatory trip to Ghirardelli Square for a monstrous ice cream sundae. In the middle of the square on weekends they would have a thing called "The Glue In" where they would dump a huge pile of mill ends and scraps from a nearby lumber mill and there would be a bunch of tables with chairs and bottles of wood glue. Parents would leave their kids to go to town crafting a masterpiece while the parents browsed all the stores surrounding the square. When I was done, I'd have some big boat or truck or house or castle or other creation to stuff in my parents car and proudly bring home.

In this day and age, I not only marvel at the forgone time when parents would leave kids unattended in such a situation, as well as the sheer joy I got from such a simplistic activity.

Nowadays, the best mileage I get for my kids is still bringing home a huge box from the local appliance store...instant clubhouse that outlasts any plastic crap toys from Target that might find their way home.

To be with kids is such a bliss ...



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