Homemade Doll Bed from a cardboard box

My daughter Rory has nothing but love for her baby, Kind of.   (Yes, that is her name, Kind of , she was Rory's present at her one year old brithday from my 4 year old niece, Shannon who originally named her.)   One thing that we like to do is pretend that “Kind of” is a real baby;   “Kind of” eats with us, plays itsy bitsy spider with us, dances with us, etc.   We have recently started to get “Kind of” ready for bed, but it was really hard for us to put her in Rory's big crib so we decided to make our own bed for her! Materials:

• A box: a shoe box, or any small to medium size box
• old wrapping paper, or paper to wrap the box in
• tape
• decorating supplies: we used crayons, letters, stickers

The first thing we did was get an old box and cut down the top flaps. To cover the box, we used some old wrapping paper left over from Christmas.   I turned the wrapping paper inside out, so that the white side was on the outside for Rory to draw and decorate, which was a huge part of the fun.   Rory could hardly wait to color in it, so it was being colored on while I was wrapping it! I wrapped it up like a present, I cut the wrapping paper large so some of it would overlap and fit on the inside of the box as well (if you choose to wrap the inside of the box, this will help make wrapping the inside of the box easier). If you are struggling for time or your toddler is being crazy, you do not need to wrap the inside of the box, the baby and blanket will cover up most of it; however I chose to wrap it.   I cut slits in the corners so they would wrap nice and pretty.   Again, it does not need   to be really nice and pretty looking on the inside since the blanket and baby will be covering. Then comes the fun part….DECORATING!   I had many old stickers laying around from my scrap booking days, and let Rory pick out what kind she wanted to use.   We also found letters to spell out Kind of.   (Of course I had to help spell them, but Rory put them on herself!). After it was made, we were able to put   Kind of in her bed and sing to her. It has now become a daily activity where we put Kind of to bed, get her changed in her pajamas, give her a blanket, sing her Twinkle Twinkle, give her kisses, and tell everyone in the house shhhh, Kind of is sleeping.   Another fun activity we have done with our dolls is label them – it’s a great way to learn the sight words of body parts and a couple of weeks ago we made mummies out of our barbies.

Hope you enjoy playing pretend with your kids and their dolls!