Hide, but Don't Seek

Forgive me...

I've just recently returned from a trip to temporary insanity.

This is what sent me there:

Problem: Oldest daughter can't find her iPod Touch. She swears she left it on her desk in her room. Now it's not there. It's no where!

Suspects:

#1: small little 15 month old. Her latest trick is to reach on top of tables and swipe what's in her grasp. If she took it off the desk, who knows where she could have dropped it.

#2: 3 year old sneak. She loves to go into her sister's room and browse the luxury department, i.e. everything her older sister has told her she's not allowed to touch. (Older sister is not aware that some days while she's at school, I let little sister in her room to play...Oh the things I can get done in the rest of the house while she's visiting heaven)

#3: a little brother. His favorite part of the new Christmas present is the ability it has to beep when lost. As soon as he learned about the "Find Me" function, he decided it's fun to play hide and seek with the iPod. When we send out the Ping signal, it's usually found in the towels, or the game cupboard, or inside the couch. Our problem, the battery had died before we knew it was lost and there was no power in it to beep.

When the Suspects were asked if they took it, not one of them denied doing it.

We seriously spent 5 days looking for this, including President's Day. But I couldn't function until it was found. This wasn't something that could easily be replaced. So towels and linens were folded and refolded. The games were all sorted through, just in case it got placed inside a box. Toy boxes were shuffled through. Couches were vacuumed out. Under the beds were cleaned and organized. Drawers had been opened and organized. The hubs even went through the outside garbage...just in case. Nothing. And then I moved on to closets. First suspect #3s. Then mine. Then to the victim.

That's when I pulled out her laundry basket to go through it and I heard something. It sounded like an angel got her wings...because it was the sound of an iPod sliding down the basket.

{Sound the Heavenly Choirs}

If my detective skills are on, I would point my finger at Suspect #1 because of the hiding spot. I'm guessing she swiped and dropped not too far from the original location. If it were Suspect #2, I probably would have found it in her bed, waiting to be used when the lights went out. And Suspect #3 would have gone much farther to hide it.

So we have now decided the she needs a spot to put her iPod. My husband came across a clever idea. We knew it needed to be something that those Suspects won't know about. So we did this in secret. (Although if truth be told, I did it in front of them, but they never notice me anyway. Seriously...it takes 3 times of asking if they've brushed their teeth before they look at me funny). And we made this:

We went to a used bookstore and bought a book. Funny enough, my oldest is a big reader. And when my husband brought this book home she asked if they had another one at the store because she might want to read this. I'm hoping she feels this same way when she gets to high school!

We also used some mod podge and felt.

My honey then used a razor to cut out a rectangle big enough to house the iPod. (We laughed that the next chapter is titled "Ruined!").

I then placed plastic bags around both sides of the book to keep the mod podge from sticking to those pages. I took my brush and first put mod podge around the pages inside the rectangle. After that had dried, I brushed mod podge around the outside pages of the book.

Once it was all dry, I mod podged the felt to the inside of the rectangle. I then cut the remaining fabric. I chose to try to cut the felt square at the top.

If I were to do it again, I think I would leave a little border of fabric and glue it down. I didn't like how it looked when I was done, so I added some scrapbook paper to pretty it up.

And now it can stay safe hiding inside this book. Shh! It's our secret.

We found the idea HERE