Half Term Crafts with "the girls"

For some reason, the Hull area have had their half term a week later than the rest of the country this time. Therefore we spent yesterday looking after our two grand-daughters, Matheea and Evie. We will also have them tomorrow, along with our niece, Charlotte - which I'm looking forward to.

Yesterday was spent with the girls playing on the computer to begin with. I never have any strict pattern as to what we do, just let things happen or not, depending on their moods, but they seem to enjoy the time spent here, so it must work for them. They are really into a site called "MovieStarPlanet" which is specifically designed to encourage children to create a virtual world with different characters. They can also network with their friends and create cartoons or films for their creations. From what I saw of it, you dressed up a cartoon girl (or boy, I guess) in whatever "Movie Star" costume you preferred, gave her/him a name and then proceeded to tell a story with that character . I was laughed at for wanting to dress Evie's character in a red dress and baseball boots, so I decided to leave them to it. They love the fact that they can each use a PC rather than having to share, since Evie uses mine and Matheea uses Keith's.  After about an hour of that (during which time I kept hearing snippets of conversation in typical American dialect from them both) they decided that they wanted to join me in my creativity. I love it when they are being creative - we all enjoy the time together!  They wanted to make one of the mini notebooks I've started creating, so I duly cut them both some card for the cover, stitched together the paper for the inside and let them decorate their covers ready for attaching to the paper. Here are their finished results - they had also planned what they were going to use them for (Evie's was going to be for a secret group at school - girls only, except Josh, apparently. Matheea said she would probably be jotting down ideas for stories she is going to write.)

No prizes for guessing whose notebook this one is!

I like the way Evie continued her design on the back cover, how cute!

Matheea likes her work to be private, obviously!

Just a simple smiley face on the back of Matheea's notebook!

Once we'd finished the books, we all had pancakes for our lunch - perfectly made by Keith, they were probably the nicest pancakes I remember eating. Matheea had three, Evie had one (which is a minor miracle considering she doesn't like golden syrup, honey and only just relented on the lemon juice with sugar idea!). They both then played with some cornflour and water mix - Matheea has been learning about thixotropic materials in school - that is, materials exhibiting a stable form at rest but becoming fluid when agitated. Evie then went on to decorate a wooden yo-yo so that she can hone her skills on the toy (not that she's really tall enough to hold the yo-yo fully let down, in my opinon, but it's cute to watch her trying) at home.

Here she is proudly demonstrating her artistic creation:

I spent the day sniffing and sneezing, so have obviously started with a cold, and left them to it for a couple of hours  on the Wii. They played on "Just Dance", which was quite hilarious to watch as Matheea was putting so much into it whilst Evie just casually made the merest hint of motion yet seemed to score higher more often than not!

Here they are strutting their stuff:

Evie looked positively bored at times, yet played for quite a long time before wanting to change the game. They moved onto the Wii Music game, which Matheea loved particularly as they could watch old videos of their previous attempts, which made her laugh immensely. Some of the saved videos were ones her parents had done - which reminded me of the time when Evie was about 3 and she was talking about her Dad using the Wii Fit. "Apparently", she told us, "Dad's not obeast any more". How cute is it when they say words incorrectly like that?

No doubt tomorrow we will be watching The Wizard of Oz and/or Heidi on DVD at some point, those being favourites for Charlotte as well as Matheea and Evie. Having never had experience of looking after boys, I wonder if they would be as interested in creative work as these 3 all seem to be? I feel very lucky to be part of their lives and I'm always happy when they are around - it must be such a blessing to be a Mother.Now, where's my hankie, my cold is getting a tad troublesome!