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 5th 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.
