I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not, but it’s something we’ve just recently tried and I’m so tickled with how well it’s worked out, I’m going to post about it just incase there’s someone out there who hasn’t tried this yet.
We’ve always kind of despised all the Thomas train and Plan City sets. I mean, they’re so cute. And we went through the trouble of building our own wooden table to set it all up (darn nice, if I do say so myself, with a flipable table top hand-painted by moi). But those tracks – argh, those tracks! Always getting knocked over or bumping out of place. Every few minutes it was, “Moooooooommy! The tracks came apart! The bridge fell over! The road broke!” It got to the point that either Jag would give up and move on to something else (usually playing with the trains or cars on the ottomans instead), or *I* would get fed up, box the entire sets up and put them back into the closet.
WELL, a friend of mine a while back suggested earthquake putty. I bought a pack, but that was right around the time that we were getting our house in order to sell (long story – we almost moved to Austin, TX) so we had put the train table in storage and the putty got shoved into a cabinet. Fast forward to this past weekend… Kat has recently discovered Thomas. She loves playing with the “choo choos” so we thought we’d dust off the ‘ole table and dig up the putty.
Let me tell you something – that putty WORKS! It’s awesome! It’s strong enough to hold the tracks, roads and pieces down so that they aren’t bumped or knocked by little hands, but not so strong that the adults can’t pull the pieces up (NO damage to the table top!) and change the track around if we need to. Seriously – it’s fantastic and it’s made the train sets and Plan City sets so much more fun. We’ve had it set up since yesterday, the kids have been playing with it non-stop and there hasn’t been a single instance of track or road coming up or moving.
YIPPEE!
