Porn, Predators, and Pinterest Projects - Oh, my

Ah, the horrors of the internet. We all fear what our children will be exposed to - porn, predators... My 5 year old’s newest obsession is You Tube. She pretends to be incompetent when we ask her to clean her room, but if we look the other direction, she takes her Barbie movies over to the computer and copies the words off them into the search engine to find related videos. And what she’s found is shocking. There is a whole segment of the adult population that spends their spare time recording themselves playing with dolls. Not blow-up dolls, which is what I would’ve expected her to find, but real, actual dolls. Then there are others who construct doll accessories.

Three days ago, (the first day of summer vacation) my daughter started begging to build a bed for her doll, Elsa. At first I thought she’d dreamed up the idea on her own and warned her that I'm not a preschool teacher and her expectations were a bit too high, but then she showed me the video of a guy named Chad Alan who constructs doll beds. Chad, if you’re reading this, I beg you to stop making doll beds and go drink and get laid like everyone else your age. You’ll have plenty of time when you’re frustrated and middle aged to do this shit. Trust me. You’re ruining my life.

But guilt makes people do funny things. This is the time of year I feel pressure to round out my children’s education and teach everything they can’t learn in school. So while most people are probably sleeping in and enjoying their first weekend with no homework to contend with, we’re building a bed for Elsa. See? I do things other than criticize our school system in my spare time occasionally. My 5 yr old and I are breaking down the problem of making the bed and working on it together. What supplies are used in the video? What do we have around the house that could be used instead? Does she want to spend her own money on supplies or use substitutions from our recycling bin?

Since I’m so thrilled with this experience, I thought I’d give you pointers on how to build one, so you, too, can share in my misery. Our bed is shamelessly plagiarized from Chad’s example, seen in the picture below.

But we don’t have beautiful Christmas icicles randomly lying around, or perfectly cut Styrofoam, or a professional, matching star, so we had to improvise. This bed cost us $0 and only a marginal amount of my sanity since there wasn’t much left to begin with.

Things we used:

Wooden BBQ skewers

Craft beads and sequins I’ve had in a box since high school

Blue craft paint/brushes

A cardboard shipping box from Nancy Meyer (I highly recommend skipping making this bed altogether and shopping at Nancy Meyer instead)

Clear plastic forks

A spare piece of scrapbook paper that sort-of matches

A clear plastic sunflower seed container (or any plastic food container you're ready to dispose of)

A glue gun

Clear school glue

My 11 year old daughter

Step 1: Cut the box into bed pieces & paint the pieces and 5 skewers. If you want to skewer your child before you finish this section, I recommend you abort the project because it only gets worse. Also, enjoy your child's enthusiasm now, because it'll quickly diminish.

Step 2: Cut part of the plastic container into something vaguely shaped like a snowflake and add sequins with clear school glue.

Step 3: Break the tongs off the plastic forks to make them look like icicles.

Step 4: Glue sequin and scrapbook paper decorations to the headboard and footboard.

Step 5: This is where the magic happens (and there are no pictures to prove it because I can't hot glue and take photographs at the same time). Hot glue the bed pieces together. Glue a skewer to each corner and add decorative beads to the ends. Cut the 5^th skewer into smaller pieces (regular scissors worked fine for this), add similar decorative beads, and stick them on the headboard. Then sick the plastic-fork icicles in between and hot glue them, too. Fold the rest of the scrapbook paper over the bed as a sheet. Then coerce an 11 year old to make a pillow out of random fabric so you don’t have to.

Presto! You have a bed for Elsa, hopefully a child who is more enthusiastic than mine, and no fingerprints, thanks to the hot glue. Today is only the 3rd day of summer. I'm not sure how much longer I can pretend to be an engaged parent. I wonder if Chad Alan wants to babysit.