Keeping the Peace

My kids love to draw and color and cut and create.  And they are always, always, always asking me for paper.  When my 4 year old doodled all over my check book, I knew I had to come up with something better. 

One day I stared at our empty popcorn tin and an idea hit me.  For some reason the tin seemed perfect for storing crayons.  Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if we could have a roll of paper on our table like at Macaroni Grill?  When I mentioned it to Scott, he was instantly on board. 

So, when my grandparents sent us money for Christmas, I knew at once what I wanted to buy the family.  (remember that hilarious Amazon description I posted back in December?)

This paper has worked out so so so wonderfully for the circus fam!

I love it.  We don’t use it every day… I think the novelty of it is what helps it work.  But, it is perfect to pull out on those days when we’ve just kinda reached that point where we’re all going a little crazy, we’ve done all that needs to be done and now I am just trying to survive till Dad gets home.  You know that time of day?

I love that all 4 of them can enjoy it.  With the paper covering the whole table, the little man can color without coloring the table.  I love that they can draw bigger than an 8x11 sheet of paper.  It’s thick enough that we can use it on both sides.  Sometimes they’ll do such beautiful pictures that they’ll cut them out to save.  

Sometimes after we’ve used both sides, they’ll just cut… Because it’s fun to cut. 

If your interested in getting your own, I ended up going with 36 inch wide craft paper b/c it pretty much covered the width of our table… Even after the fabulous review for butcher paper I read on amazon, I found I didn’t have room for a roll quite that large and so the craft roll better suited our needs. It was skinner than I expected, but we use both sides of the paper so that stretches it some.  I have aspirations of some day attaching it to the underside of the table, back by the wall and then we can just pull it out as needed.  But, for now it stores easily in the rectangular box it came in and sits on the back of our piano.  Craft/Butcher paper on the dining room table works for me!!