Let me explain…

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Your kid takes a teddy bear to bed. Mine takes a flashlight. And yes, she cuddles up with it. Yeah, she’s weird. Really.

Only, the other night, while having a fit, Vista threw her flashlight across the room and broke it.

Now we could have taken the ‘too bad, so sad, sucks to be you for breaking your flashlight’ route. But I prefer to stay sane. So of course we went out and bought her a new flashlight.

And, of course, we couldn’t find the same pretty pink princess flashlight, so she picked out a Buzz Lightyear one instead. (great…my kid as a thing for space cadets)

Anyway… The new flashlight? Blindingly bright. Which is great if you’re looking for something in the damp dark recesses of a crawl space. Not so great if you’re handing it to a 3 year old who hasn’t quite grasped the concept of not shining the bright things in her eyes. What? She’s cute. Back off.

So we did what any parents would do. Tried to crazy glue something onto the top of the flashlight so it wasn’t so bright.

This? Did not work. At all. I may have gotten really high on the fumes produced by the attempt, though.

So, in true MacGyver fashion, we turned to the next best thing. Duct tape. Only…. we couldn’t find any in the house. We think it ran away with the roll of electrical tape that’s also missing.

After some scrambling, we tracked down a roll of packing tape, decided it would do.

Fifteen minutes of digging through all my craft scraps produced some fabric we decided would work just fine as a dimming agent.

So voila, a dim, but still functional flashlight, that would do MacGyver proud.

Now all I have to do is trim it with some pretty pink ribbon so it’ll be a Princess Buzz Lightyear flashlight, as decreed by her highness, Queen V.