Night Animals: October's Ivy Kids Crate
October's Ivy Kids subscription box featured the adorable book Night Animals. This and the cute as anything plush skunk were without a doubt the highlights of the box.
The rest of the activities in the box were sort of hit-or-miss for us.
Some of the hits: Of course the stuffed skunk! Which actually enabled Penny to identify a skunk (and a black squirrel, which was not a skunk) in the yard. The book and personalized coloring page, the ceramic owl craft, the bat ornament, the possum puppet, and the "write your own story" activity (not pictured) were also super fun and much-loved. We had fun drawing a skunk, too. Some pics below.
The less-than-hits: pretty much everything else was less exciting. Sorting googley eyes was meh. Counting googley eyes was meh. Sending rubber bat-things across the room was super fun but using them as directed in the activity? Meh. So very meh we did it once and didn't try again. The fingerprint bat painting was fun, but I waited too long to pull the bats off so they stuck. So for Penny it was ok, for Mom is was meh. Photos...
In short, the learning activities just weren't as creative and engaging as last month's box. Flash cards of nocturnal and diurnal animals? We used it as a matching game (not per the instructions) and that was way more fun than trying to land a rubber bat on them. An info sheet on animal defenses with no activity to accompany it? Interesting, and we ended up playing "scared animal" and THAT was fun. But just an info sheet? Not much fun.
A few of our daily Surprise Boxes ended up total duds (like I put all the googley eyes in one bin. Mistake. Penny complained, "I don't want to sort eyes!" Which sort of defeats the purpose of a Surprise (aka Distraction) Bin.
So if I were paying for this myself, I'd be a bit disappointed (even the plush skunk needed a visit to the Stuffie Hospital because her stitching started to come out). But I LOVE LOVE LOVE the book, which makes it all worth while!
I had dreams for my family life, for the kids education, for my own recreation time (which currently clocked in at daily total of zero minutes, zero seconds). I longed to do things like knit, read books with real pages, write for the joy of it. Instead, I was living life of reacting—not to God’s direction—but to people’s momentary expectations, urgent tasks all shoving and bickering to be FIRST on my list. I was desperate to get back to the most important focus of every day...