xtcian

this blog was written at half-past kent

2/2/09

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Of all my crazy-ass projects, this one may have actually taken the longest. In early 2007, I saw this clock at Target with a pretty awesome twist: instead of numbers, it had little circles for photographs. They had photos of kittens and shit in them, but I figured the day would come when Lucy would know her numbers, and more importantly, know that numbers correlated to time.

Even more importantly than that, "time" can be read on a "clock", which, when mastered, meant she might not burst into our room at 5:15am with questions like "do houses sit?" and "where is 'the distance'?"

So this is our new tool for teaching time. As much of a technophile as I am, I've always hated digital clocks, and they're hard for kids to read anyway (all the squared-off digits just make things more confusing). Explaining an analog clock isn't a piece of cake either, but as long as you don't overthink it with a bunch of hooey about the big hand's relationship to the small hand, they won't remember to be confused.

Now we can tell her "don't wake us up until the small hand is on Uncle Sean's face, and the big hand is between Mommy and Daddo." She had so much fun helping pick out the pictures that she learned all her numbers as well - she only has trouble with "8", but I'm fairly confident that'll come around.

Note to those with far-flung relatives: don't try this unless you are an extensive traveler, or have many years to gather all your photographic evidence. I had each person (or couple) make their own number on a sheet of 8x10 paper, which they then held as close to their face as possible. I had to get my sister to do it twice because she changed boyfriends before the clock was finished, and I had to Photoshop li'l Barnaby into the picture because he had gone from 6 months to 2 years old.

Parents and grandparents got the coveted 3, 6, 9 and 12 spots, and as for the look of it - I dunno, it reminds of those animated shorts on old-skool Sesame Street. Yessir, another fine project years in the making. Like our motto says here at CraftDaddo, why do something easy when it can be so much more difficult?