From Pinterest: Cave of Lights

I stumbled upon this idea on Pinterest about an hour ago. It comes from a blog called Play at Home Mom, and you can find the original idea and post here.

We had a big box leftover from a car seat, and I've been letting the kids play with it. It hasn't been a huge hit, but Oliver sometimes likes to pretend it's a garage door. In fact, I drew a number panel on the side for him to pretend to enter codes to open and close the doors.

Well, when I found the "Cave of Lights" idea, I was so excited that I went straight to the living room and started poking holes in the box for Christmas lights. We have two strands of LED lights, and I used one of those since they don't get hot. I didn't want to have to worry about burns or fires.

Here's my work in progress. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to put together:

Here's the finished product from above: 

And here's how the cave looks from inside:

Oliver was so stoked!

He shut himself inside his cave. You can see the little key pad I quickly scribbled onto his "garage door" with a Sharpie:

After a few minutes, Oliver ran upstairs to grab a pillow. He laid like this and talked about the colors for a while. He also kept telling me it's "just like Grandma's!" I have no idea what he's talking about. As far as I know, there are no cave of lights at either of his grandparents' house! Maybe he was talking about the garage lights.

I emailed my husband with these photos and told him I felt like the mom of the year. Oliver loves this! Jo isn't so sure. She likes watching her brother from the outside, but she screamed in panic when I tried to put her in the box. Apparently, that's not OK.

For those of you with older toddlers and pre-schoolers, I think this idea is so clever and cute. Keep this in mind over the holiday season if you get any toys or packages in large boxes. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, t also might be cute to set this up on Christmas Eve night for your kids to discover in the morning! Thanks, Play at Home Mom!