You all have them - you know the ones, those large, metal cans that coffee and baby formula come in. You empty them, stick them in the back of a cupboard somewhere, in the hopes of using them for....something.
We don't have coffee cans in our home, but we do have the ones from baby formula, with my 8 month old being recently weaned from breastmilk. Here are some can uses that I have come up with, past and present.
- Pencil containers - as a teacher I once had saved up 25 of them and had all my grade 1 students use them for their pencils/crayons/erasers and treasures - worked amazingly well!
- Sewing kit stash - I keep this in a bathroom cupboard for all those emergency lost buttons, fallen hems etc etc. I have a few buttons, a few different colours of thread, some needles, pins (both straight and safety) and a small pair of scissors. I don't have to dig through my other sewing stuff for the necessities, and it means I can avoid the stapler and tape for those omigosh-it's-8-am-we-are-going-to-be-late-and-an-IMPORTANT(aka necessary to not be x-rated)button-on-my-blouse-popped-off-aaaaghhhh! kind of mornings.
- Craft items storage - dump the stuff in, stick on a label, there you go.
- Treasure container - give a couple to your child, and in no time they will have them filled with all sorts of fabulous treasures. Currently, we have one that contains rocks, one that contains some plastic food (her "lunch"), and one that has an assortment of broken crayons, pencils and pens (pilfered from my can of pens on my desk).
- Drum set - we had a great concert with them yesterday, courtesy of my babes - and thankfully, they have quite a muted sound when they bang on the plastic lid end.
- Cookie jar.
- Storage container for items purchased at the bulk barn - it's not see-through but it sure doesn't shatter when it hits the tile floor, the way glass does.
- Baby bottle catcher - for nipples, lids, the rings, those silly plastic stoppers that no one ever seems to use to avoid bottle leaking during transport....all that stuff that ends up everywhere in the kitchen and you can never find it for those bleary-eyed 3 am feedings.
What do you use them for?
Posts
poke a hole in each side of them, put a string thru, the height of the child's waist and let them walk around the house with them, using them like stilts. We did this with my dad's tobacco cans as a child. Hours of fun.
ReplyDeleteGood one! I think I'm gonna try it the next miserable day.
ReplyDeleteI use them much the same you do, but to make them pretty, I cover them with old wall paper. You can glue things like old buttons, pebbles, etc. on them as well. Jackie's post reminded me that when I was a kid my sister and I would drill a hole in the bottom of two and attach a string between them to make walkie talkies. They didn't work but we thought they did.
ReplyDeleteI fill one with some sand for an ashtray outisde when we have company so I don't have their 'butts' laying on the yard and driveway!
ReplyDeleteDonate the cans to your local physio department. We use them all the time for quad strengthening exercises
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