We have been looking at "road rugs," those ubiquitous mats with aerial views of roads, buildings, and such for playing with toy cars, off and on for several months. We didn't really want a set of interlocking road pieces to kick around the house, so for a two- to three-year-old a fixed layout made the most sense to me.

But I have never liked the way most of these mats, like the one at left, cover non-road areas with buildings, trees, and other objects. I know they mean well, but the end result (if my own childhood memories serve) an environment where everything is predetermined for you gets old pretty fast. Kids can do better than this; just this morning Z carefully placed four blocks next to each other and happily informed me that it was a farm. As I examined the road rugs with their airports, variety stores, construction sites, churches and homes, I saw a line in the sand, and I wanted to stay on the side of the four-block farms for the time being.

My first epiphany was the realization that a ruglike character is only one way to make the map durable; another is to make a smaller model which could be used on a table, so someone like Z didn't have to crawl over it to reach its farthest reaches.

Jenni voiced some initial concerns that the product of my humble efforts might look a wee bit, ahem, trashy, especially when I blithely snagged a 30x40" piece of the cheapest posterboard the grocery store had to offer and declared my desire to "draw" Z a map. Now, my skills with pen and paper pretty much leveled off at the fifth grade, but for a fifth-grader I was pretty hot stuff, and besides, how much drawing skill did I really need to muster for a kid who can draw a circle and call it an octopus? But Jenni's point was well-taken; we had to look at it, too, and what might look okay on delivery day might get old fast.


Once I decided to go all-paper with my layout, things got very easy. At a local hobby store I picked up a nice heavy 20x30" piece of posterboard in a sensible background color (a sort of sagey green) for about $5 and a big piece of gray construction paper. Then I poked around in the scrapbooking section for some usable patterns on 8x8" sheets of light card stock at 50 cents apiece. After cutting out my roadway, I cut up some shapes from the other papers and pushed the pieces around until I came up with a layout I liked, then glued it all down with a glue stick. Here's what I came up with:


In the end, I was pretty satisfied with what I came up with. I think this is something Z can use her own imagination with, and it can adapt to fairly different emphases depending on her mood and the toys she wants to play with. Here's a model setup:


You can buy wooden cars on Amazon.com, but they are a little pricey for my taste; I bought the ones shown throughout this post at Target for $1 each.

This post from the ZRecs Archives was originally published on December 4, 2006. You can access the original post here.

My granddaughter Z and I have a cat. Well, we sort of have a cat. "Cat," which is what we call him, is sort of borrowed from a neighbor. Well, we really don’t borrow it, so much as it borrows us. We feed it, we pet it, we let it in when it is cold. It seems to prefer our house to its real home, and that is okay with us.

I grew up on a farm and had probably, over the years, at least 25 cats. That was in the day when farmers kept cats around more as tools than as pets. But I loved each cat, each kitten, and mourned the passing of each one. The cat mortality rate in the country is high - dogs, coyotes, bobcats, disease, cars, even hawks take their toll. So each cat was precious to me, while I had it.

So now, many years later, living in the suburbs, I have another cat, sort of. Cat likes Z, but not too much. The only thing Cat really likes is eating and mewing at our door. But somehow, we love Cat, mainly because Z delights in feeding Cat and trying to pet Cat, and chasing Cat, and closely, very closely, observing Cat. She delights when Cat grooms himself, and the way his teeth look up close as she observes him from the "safe" side of the glass door. Z listens for his mew each morning she is here (she and I spend two days a week together), then feeds him and watches him eat. Until I watched Z watch Cat I had forgotten the awe an animal can instill in a child learning about the natural world.

And so we watch over Cat. Unfortunately Cat isn’t much of a personality, as cats go. He is young enough to be active, but evidently too old to do much in the way of play. Cat has been, well, fixed, so catting around does not take up much of his time. He spends most of the day just lying on the porch, waiting for his next meal.

And so, it was with some bemusement as we watched Cat go absolutely nuts over the wool balls we sampled from Purrfect Play. He hit them, he swatted them, he rolled on them, he chewed them, he chased them and we stood slack jawed wondering what had gotten into him. Z had not known Cat could do such things, nor had I.



Then we brought out the catnip-filled “Happy Carrot” toys. Now we were in business.



We highly recommend the Purrfect Play Wool Balls and catnip toys, without reservation. They will delight both you and your cat.



Many pet items are made using the same harmful chemicals we now know to avoid exposing our children to - PVC, phthalates, pesticides, and harmful dyes in particular. That's where Purrfect Play has found a niche worth filling. The wool balls are hand formed from sustainably produced dye-free wool which has only been processed with gentle non-toxic soaps. Medium balls sell for $4.95, large balls sell for $6.95. This is an astonishing price for such an attractive, natural toy. A cluster of Happy Baby Catnip carrots is $12.95, and if there are grades of catnip, Purrfect Play is apparently using the primo stuff. (And yes, it is certified organic.) Z kept looking at me puzzled and delighted as Cat danced and soared, bounding into the sky as he hit the claw into the air.

For more information, and toys and other gear for dogs, and gifts for pet owners, check out Purrfect Play's website. The wool balls in particular would make a great gift for any cat lover, or for your own cat. They are pretty enough that I wanted to display them, but gave them to Cat instead.

I thought my Build-A-Face Kit was a pretty creative use of Shrinky Dinks.


As any kid can show you, though,


there's creative,


and then there's creative.

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