Creativity Corner: Creating a Child-Sized Agility Center

My mom is one of those people who is wasted in corporate America - she was born to be a toymaker. Since my nieces were born a few years ago, she's devoted her spare time to elaborate and innovative projects for the girls every Christmas, including a miniature dance studio, a "Mouse House" for a character named Millie Mouse - complete with a homemade board book my mom wrote and illustrated with photos of Millie inside her Mouse House - and an epic children's book illustrated with collages of the girls in all sorts of amazing situations. This year, since my youngest niece, Maya, is wild about dogs, Mom and I had the brilliant idea of combining our talents to create an agility center in miniature. We're just getting started, but I thought I'd share a little of what Mom has done thus far.

She found this small, lightweight bookshelf at a lawn sale for $5 - where I see something like that and think, well, "Bookshelf," she immediately starts seeing such items as the base for her elaborate creations.




Because there weren't many shelves to remove, my mom started by simply laying the shelf on its back and figuring out exactly what parts she wanted to include and how she would need to modify the whole thing. Initially, two fabric baskets were nested at the top of the shelf. She removed the baskets and used that area to create the upper level of the agility center, where we now have a dock and tub so Maya can play "Dock Dogs," since we took her to see the Dock Dogs this summer and she's been nuts about them ever since:




Underneath the dock itself, we'll be adding a sliding curtain and several dollhouse dog crates we found on Amazon; that will be where the dogs hang out in between their performances. Also on the lower level, Mom cut a couple of boards to form a solid floor over the slats at the back of the shelf. She was able to find a cheap, green scatter rug to simulate grass, and cut it in two so that part of it sits on the shelf itself and the rest extends beyond so that there's enough room for the whole agility course. I went online and found a gently used Breyer agility set on Ebay for twenty bucks, and Mom repaired a couple of pieces that weren't quite up to snuff, so that now we have a complete agility course:




Pretty cool, eh? Now, I know what you're thinking: that's all great, but it sounds like Jen's Mom has done pretty much all of this. How does Jen get to say this is "her" project, too? Excellent question. Basically as far as I can tell, I'm a creative consultant. Plus, I get to do all the graphics to put on the sides and interior of the structure, to make it look like an authentic doggy center any junior canine aficionado would be proud to call her own. But mostly, I just get to play with the little plastic doggies while my mama's kid-friendly brain spins and somersaults. I highly recommend it. I'll be sure to post more of the project as it evolves; having seen the things Mom has created in the past, I have no doubt it will be ridiculously, fabulously elaborate by the time December 25 rolls around!