Reuse Wipe Lids to Overcome Your Toddler’s Shyness

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My 2 1/2 year old daughter is bubbly, talkative, and silly…when she is around my husband and I. Put her in a room full of people and she wants held while she sucks on her hand and hides behind her lovey. We have been working with her on this and she has been doing better, but I knew that a upcoming family reunion was not going to be easy for her. Thankfully, I found a fun and easy way to reuse wipe lids to help her warm up quickly. By the end of the week she was talking to everyone and even let a few people hold her.

My daughter loves looking at pictures, especially pictures of people. I wanted to give her a chance to see a picture of everyone she was going to see and associate a name with it. My hope was this would set expectations and create some familiarity. It was also a great way to introduce extended family structure to her. I say introduce instead of learn because she decided she liked the term “uncle” so much that everyone was an uncle by the end of the week. This included “uncle dada” and “uncle me”.

This same process can be used for more than just pictures of family members. Read this super interesting blog article from Maggie’s Milk on some of the benefits of looking at pictures.

How to Reuse Wipe Lids to Make Family Pictures

Materials:

• Family pictures
• Wipe Lids
• Cardstock
• Laminator (optional)
• Scissors
• Hot glue gun

Creating:

The first step in making these wipe lid family pictures is to print out the pictures you want to use. I searched through Facebook and added pictures of everyone I wanted to a Word Document. It took a couple of prints and some trial and error before I got the pictures the right size for my wipe lids. For the sake of this post I made one of my daughter’s elephant lovey named Lumpy too. Lumpy is very special and I even made her a sleep sack.

Once the pictures are printed, you need to cut them out. To get the right size, I took a blank piece of cardstock and traced the bottom of each brand of wipe lid on it. After I cut it out, I cut off about 1/8″ around the whole outside to make room for the lamination later. You can skip trimming them if you don’t plan on laminating them. Then I traced my pattern on all my pictures and cut them all out.

Now it’s time to laminate. This makes them last longer and protects them from spills. You can skip this step if you don’t care about how well they hold up. I followed my laminator‘s instructions to laminate all my pictures. Then I cut them out leaving about 1/8″ of lamination around the outside.

After letting your hot glue gun heat up, glue around the outside of each lid and place a picture on each one. After they cooled, I had a little bit of overhang that I needed to cut off.

The last thing I did was use a sharpie to write each person’s name on the outside. My daughter is too young to read them, but it was super helpful for me to be able to find specific people.

We spent the hour car ride to my parents’ house for the reunion passing these back and forth. My daughter would open them and we would practice their name. Then she would pass them back and I would give her new ones. It was such an easy way to keep her entertained on the way and I really do think it helped her warm up to everyone. They were also a great way to reuse wipe lids that I had been keeping for a while. If you have a shy toddler, give these a try the next time you are preparing for a large gathering.