Wadding Paper

While this is an activity that Erik loves to do (and that I've tried to facilitate often to help build those hand muscles), we actually hadn't planned on doing it as a post. That is until I got my hands on some newspaper that needed to be wadded up for an upcoming activity. So we made an event of it and took pictures, and here you go!
While Paisley contentedly played with our pile of newspaper, Erik and I started wadding up some pieces of paper (I had already torn these to be the size I wanted so they were manageable for his little hands).

Erik had a blast. He got lots of compliments on his big strong muscles, and got to smash and "destroy" stuff to his heart's content. 

As we finished wadding up the balls of paper we started filling up my biggest mixing bowl (I will admit that after he was done I gave the wads of paper an extra squeeze because I needed them to be somewhat tightly packed). It turned into a bit of a race because Paisley thought it was super fun to try to pull the balls of paper out faster than we could put them in. 

Erik and I finally prevailed and got our bowl full of paper. He loved getting to throw the balls into the bowl. 

Once I knew I had enough to fill up the bowl, I just let the kids go to town on it. They had a lot of fun playing in them, and when Erik lost interest and Paisley became obsessed with eating them, I finally put them away to wait until I was ready to do the final activity that all this was leading up to.