Thursday, January 23, 2014

Quiet Book for the BOY!

I made my boy a quiet book for his second birthday, and I was so excited to finally be able to dig into "boy" pages since Nate is into trucks, tractors, trains, cars, and monsters.  I don't even want to count how many things with wheels entered our home between Christmas presents and his birthday presents....


I used my tutorial for a quiet book cover, covered with tractors and trucks, of course.


The first page is his name with snap on letters and a dump truck with button on wheels.  I used the dump truck template here.


The number page I did using train cars, inspired by this page.

I think the train cars turned out to be very cute.  I wanted to incorporate touchpoints from Touch Math in the same way that I did in my other quiet books. However, these numbers are smaller and the button touchpoints really distract from the numbers themselves.  I don't think I would do the buttons the same way again.  The train cars stick to the page using velcro.



I fell in love with these two pages from Imagine Our Life.  I HAD to make the forklift and the dump truck.

Her templates are so easy to use and they turn out so cute.

I mean, the forklift goes up and down.  Are you kidding me?



The dump truck dumps like a champ and has been Nate's favorite activity so far.


I liked the idea of adding a versatile pouch to a quiet book.  It can hold anything!  Busy bag games, puzzles, trains and tracks, etc....

Right now it is holding a popsicle stick building game from a busy bag we had.  The pouch has snaps attached so we can remove it from the book entirely if we feel like it.

The parking lot page is one of my favorite pages in the book and one of the only ones that is of my own inspiration and design.

The hot wheel size cars store in the zipper pocket and you drive them to their parking spots for a fun color matching activity just for boys like mine.



The last page is inspired by Nate's love for Monsters, Inc.  The closet door theme from the intro to the movie inspired me to create a fun door pocket, and inside the closet.....

MONSTERS!  Monster finger puppets to be exact.  I loved the monster templates that I found here, but they were a little large for finger puppets.

Easy solution!  I downloaded her pattern and opened it up in Adobe Reader then pushed print.  Once the print menu came up I went to the "Page Scaling" section and chose the option for multiple pages per sheet and chose 3 pages across by 3 pages down and printed.  When they printed out they were the perfect size for finger puppets :)



I think I am going to slow down on the quiet books now, perhaps until the twins are ready for them in a couple years ;)  Which could be slightly influenced by the fact that making this book sent me to an urgent care clinic to get stitches for the first time in my life....  Rotary cutters are deadly man!  The quiet book that literally cost me an arm, haha. Nate better treasure the blood, sweat, and stitches poured into this present!