Cheerios to the rescue!

As I was putting Lucas to bed last night, I heard it pounding like mad against the window. The rain, that is. Perfect timing too, when Nate wasn't home, and I couldn't save our porch from the torrential downpour. It made it 6 feet horizontally, the whole way into the toy box. Needless to say, everything was soaked, and we didn't play on the porch this morning.

play porch paradise, when dry

So, we played inside instead. Lucas quickly found his sand toys (thank goodness Aunt Kristin cleaned them before we left the beach). As soon as he picked up the orange shovel, he crawled over to the cat food. Then he came back, got the gray shovel and went back. "Hmmm," I thought, "what could he be doing?" And this is what I discovered.

Yep, he was digging with his sand shovels in the cat food. Lovely. We really need to get this boy a sandbox.

I decided that I needed to find something else for him to dig in, so I got out a big plastic storage container and some cheerios.

You can tell by his cat-food-eating-grin, that he's pretty excited by this. But, with only one container, he wanted to transfer the cheerios with his shovels into the cat food dishes. So, I got out a second container.

Much better. So, we spent a good 1/2 hour shoveling cheerios back and forth between 2 plastic containers. It was a great language opportunity too... shovel, scoop, pour. The cheerios make great sounds in the container too. Lucas got sick of the shovel after awhile, and...

he decided to just use his hands. one.cheerio.at.a.time. That was amusing to watch. But, he still wanted to help feed the cats, even with two bowls and "cat food" of his own.

So I let him use his sand shovel to scoop real cat food into their dish. Here's what Sofía (named after the queen of Spain) had to say about the whole thing...

What a curiously creative little boy that Lucas is! I just love him to pieces!