Recycled Car City

Our little guy is currently addicted to two foods - sliced deli turkey and Happy Baby Green Puffs.  He goes through several canisters of the latter a week!  The bottles the puffs come in have such a cool shape, I've decided to give myself the challenge of reinventing them.  Especially given that Earth Day is in a few days, I figured this would be the perfect post!  Perhaps you also have some puff containers (or other bottles) that could be used to create a super fun car city.  :)

Just to illustrate - this is the stash of bottles after just two weeks.  Yikes.  Do you think they have a twelve step program for babies?  ;)

First we stripped the plastic off the outside.  It came off very easily with scissors.  Then we used some of S's copious foam sticker stash to decorate.  We have a whole set of mixed color geometric shapes, so those that weren't already squares or rectangles were easily cut into those shapes.  If you'd like your city to be monochromatic, Michaels and other craft stores sell large sheets of adhesive foam for less than a dollar!

S helped me decorate the buildings.  We decided to do a set of three rows of windows two wide on each side to make the bottles look like skyscrapers.

X inspected our work.  While he loved the city buildings and was actually quite gentle with them, we found that he liked to eat the roads, so he sat in his highchair and snacked (on more puffs, hahaha) while S set up her city.

I made several strips of varying length roads by cutting up some large black foam sheets I bought at Michaels for around 60 cents each.  Using a glue gun, I glued on little yellow stripes to divide the road into two lanes.

We absolutely loved how this project turned out.  S has already made several different configurations of cities, and there's always room to expand because it's super easy to make more roads!

She set up this city to have a square in the middle and told me that's where the city's park and playground were.  :)

We have these cute little wooden cars from a set she got for her first birthday, but you could absolutely use Hot Wheels cars as well.  The scale is just perfect for them, I think.

S had fun narrating the story of the various cars.  Here red car had to travel the whole length of the city to get to his friend's house.

Here he's knocking on the door to see if his friend is home.

And after a fun day of driving around, he parked in his garage.  Hahaha.

All in all this whole project cost less than $3!  We have been having so much fun with our recycled car city - we highly recommend it!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.