Creating Zen

Well, a Zen Garden anyway.  I decided a Zen Garden would be a nice element to add to the living room, especially since I'm constantly trying to find ways to distract my family from actually watching t.v. :)

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My plan is to replace the coffee/candle holder thing with a homemade Zen Garden. This is my homemade coffee table (yes there is coffee beans on the coffee table, it seemed like a funny thing to do at the time!)  This trunk coffee table was once a rusty-looking trunk I got at a garage sale for free about 10 years ago, and have been using it to store blankets in ever since.  I've moved with this trunk 3 times and each time someone tried to convince me to throw it away, but I refused :)  I told Dustin I had been seeing trunks as coffee tables and maybe I should do this to our trunk too.  He wasn't completely agreeable (actually, I think the words he used was, "that sounds like a horrible idea") so one day when he was working on his camper, I painted the trunk with chalk board paint, spray painted gold trim and ran to Target and bought the pretty stuff on top. I had the candles lit to surprise him when he got home...and he thought it looked... Awesome!, good job, me :)

So I've now decided that I want something a little more interactive than the coffee on the coffee table, so Sadie and I went to Hobby Lobby, to gather the necessary items for our Zen Garden.

Here are the items we purchased.

This was the tray we found, on clearance from $59.99 to $12.00 because there was a crack in one of the ceramic tiles, really Hobby Lobby...$60 for a tray?

First we poured in the sand

Then we spread out the sand

and arranged the tools

Sadie wouldn't even look up for a picture.  She played with this nonstop for 2 hrs! I didn't quite expect that, but I also didn't quite expect that my nose was going to confuse sand for dust!  I'm allergic to dust and dust is an irritant for me.  The more she played the harder it was to breathe.  I finally opened up the back door and begin to panicly suck in air like a dog sticking its head out the car window for fresh air.  This did not feel at all Zenlike :( 

I finally got Sadie to look up as she was saying (while gritting her teeth in annoyance), 

"I'm trying to work on my project".

I still couldn't breathe that well when Sadie began to dig deeper into the sand, making the metal tool scrape the ceramic bottom, it was like nails on a chalk board!  I explained my distaste for scrapping sounds and she was more careful, thankfully!  She then decided to use her hands, of course and I explained that the sand had to stay in the tray.  20 minutes later, I'm vacuuming sand off the carpet and trunk for the 2nd time :) Not really feeling the Zen here!  

I think I'm going to have to change the sand to something less dusty like rice or, hmm I guess I could always use coffee! :)