Works for me Wednesday -
Well I don't know about all of you but I just love that the kids get stickers 
at the bank and at the doctor's offices now...but with my first born I didn't know what to do with those wonderful, colorful, stimulating images. So being a creative soul and knowing a little bit about visual stimulation for babies, I started putting them on the inside roof of the car!!! Wow, what an amazing journey it has become over the years! 
When DD#1 was a baby she would look up at the images and work on word recognition "Elmo" and color identification "Red" as well as discussing the stories about characters...Once upon a time...she would say and mommy would tell a story about the character in the sticker.
Then along came DD#2 and the collection grew and
expanded which led us to playing alphabet games with our toddler and more color and word development with the new baby. Then the girls grew and demanded more chanllenging uses of the 
stickers. The game of I*SPY evolved, incorporating alphabet awareness, problem solving, understanding rules and managing frustration as well as more color identification in such creative ways.We are able to recall wonderful memories of trips to parks and field trips with school as we also
keep those stickers from being a chaperone or from admittance to zoos and museums.So now my children have collected hundreds of stickers and enjoy them all whenever we are in
the car for short trips to the store or long trips to grandma's house. They use the stickers to communicate to their new little sister (DD#3) and feel connected to her as they now choose stickers that *she* would like to look at and to make sure they all have similar colors and princesses. The bonding and 
comradere as well as sharing and learning that has occured over the years because we collect stickers has been overwhelming.Feelings are not to be overlooked either. Sometimes we come
across scarey or "not pretty" sticker which we struggled with ...do we give it back to the nice bank teller or are we gracious and say "thank you". They figured out how to use those stickers as well...they have fun putting the "boy" ones in Daddy's seat or we are able to talk about difficult feelings and how those are just as important as other happy, fun feelings. We also are able to look at the images and talk about what that character might be thinking or 
feeling...we work on compassion as we share that most folks that are angry are usually sad inside about something or haven't been shown much kindness in their life.The car is not damaged either as opposed to placing stickers on the windows and the kids have a vehicle that they are so incredibly proud of...to play games in, carpool with friends and to just show off to their friends! Everyone wants to ride in our car!
This definitely Works For Me!!! I hope it works for you too!
