The Ancient Art of Perler Beads

After Adriana went home for the day (I now watch BB's classmate aftr school who lives just a few blocks away), the kids and I sat out on the deck to make perler bead projects. If you haven't seen these, they are teeny tiny little plastic beads that you must place one by one onto a teeny tiny peg on a shaped pegboard. Once the pegboard shape is completely filled you then iron it and the plastic beads fuse together to make one solid plastic thing when it cools and you pull it off the pegboard.

Lets just say these things are a lesson in extreme focus and patience. I felt in almost a zenlike state at one point, hunched over at the plastic picnic table,placing the beads carefully one by one , while Jimmy would dig through the bowl of beads and pick out the color I then needed, using a pair of plastic tweezers. Meanwhile, Barbara worked singlemindedly on her own perler project and Sammy slurped lustily away on his pacifier.

It was a little microcosm of life. We are all different tiny little beads, seemingly insignificant in our own right, but each crucial to the formation of a whole, chosen specifically for our color and placed purposefully into the whole which eventually melded together by extreme heat, like the shared burning pain of humanity.

And then there is the analogy of the beads toeach moment, or action, or piece of our own lives. Slowly with time we piece together a whole, and those with foresight and faith in a finality to their lifes project create a beautiful coherent finished product, not just a mass of randomly placed beads.

I hope you've realized I was being facetious with my analogies, although they actually kind of do work well!

Here's what we had to show for our time: