Bonjour!

In my last post, I told you that we were back and that we had set our sights on a new country. Now, you get to see which one. In case the title didn't give it away, we are taking a virtual tour of France. 

A while ago, I had seen this really cute project on Pinterest that I was really wanting to make with my littles. 

*** This is not my photo. I found it on Pinterest, pinned from Craft Gossip.com ***

However, as soon as I told them that France was our next country, Aiden eagerly jumped up and down saying, "Can we build an Eiffel Tower with popsicle sticks?" Since this whole adventure is geared toward giving them experiences that they enjoy, I love when they have ideas of ways to do that. So the sugar wafers will not be brought to our house this time around, instead, we are using some serious hard core building materials. ;) 

I forgot what it's like to have Preston around for our craft projects, and as I mentioned in my last post, he is going to college and his hours are such that he is home a lot more right now. So, I asked him, "What kind of glue do you think would be best for this?" If you know my husband, you know this is a silly question. He immediately starts riffling through his glue supply: super glue, Gorilla Glue, etc. I laughed and reminded him that our littles would be using the glue at the same table that we eat at and he put his glue away.  After settling on the "right" glue (tacky glue), we sat down with our materials and a photo of the Eiffel Tower. 

Next up was cutting some of the popsicle sticks. I asked Preston to cut them. He started looking for .... wait for it.... a saw! (Are you seeing a pattern here?) I told him that probably my pruning shears from my gardening box would suffice for cutting popsicle sticks. 

Aiden started sorting the popsicle sticks (aka craft sticks) into piles of "straight" and "not straight". So that we would be sure to only use ones that were straight. 

Believe it or not, constructing The Eiffel Tower with popsicle sticks was harder than we had imagined. We played around the sticks before coming to the conclusion that we needed to create four sides, then attach them to each other. We made sure that we measured them so when we put the four sides together they would line up correctly. 

After the glue was dry on our four sides, it was time to put them together. My little El loves to glue, so this was her job. 

Putting it together took the grown ups though. The littles couldn't quite get that part. 

After it was standing, Eliana added glue to the edges. 

The picture below is actually before the glue went on, but I wanted to put this here to share with you that we were planning to leave it like this, but once we saw it standing up, it looked like it was missing the very top part. 

After brainstorming some ideas, Aiden and Eliana glued 8 popsicle sticks together and we slid them into the gap at the top.

We might end up painting this black for authenticity, but we haven't decided yet. 

What structures have you created with popsicle sticks? Have you built bridges like these fun ones that I found on Pinterest a couple of days ago? Or do you stick to making popsicles with them? 

Of course, I'm also dying to know if your significant other always goes for the "big guns" (or do you?) when tackling a project, or is it just my hubby who goes a bit overboard in this department? 

(For fun facts about The Eiffel Tower, we visited this site, and of course, we checked out what Wikipedia had to offer for information as well.)

***Don't forget, the highlighted blue words are links :) ***