"A smile is a curve that sets everything straight."

Just a very quick post today. Mrs M has been feeling a little down the last few days so myself and my little assistant set about our 'make mommy smile morning'. Whenever Mrs M is having a bad day we make her a card, there is a big box in the house of 'I love you' cards that we have made and today we were adding to our collection. Firstly i looked to my partner in crime for some inspiration. "What shall we make Mommy today Opeie?"... "A Princess". Good clear instructions from a two year old, that's what i love.

I stood behind Opeie and helped him cut out the pieces for the face and then he did all of the gluing including googly eyes and gems for the crown, as always it was a real team effort. Opeie kept saying "Mommy's going to be so happy" which i thought was adorable. He's always so proud of himself when we give Mrs M something we have made together.

The head was complete so i asked Opeie what we were going to do about the body, to which he replied "Cat in the Hat dress". Good job i had been collecting all of those Dr. Seuss books for my future craft idea.

A few pages from The Cat in the Hat and we started to make our dress...

Opeie did say 'Princess' so he needed to stick lots more sparkly gems on for the full effect. I helped Opeie write a short message inside and then talked him through writing his name himself, which for 2 years old i think he did an amazing job of (he just needed a little help on the tails of the E's).

As expected Opeie was eager to get the card to Mommy and as he showed her he looked very chuffed with himself. The card did exactly what we intended it to do and put a huge smile on mommies face. A little bit of effort goes a long way and its important for me and the boys to show Mrs M just how much we love her, she does after all put everything she has in to looking after us.

"It's like my heart is a tooth, and it's got a cavity that can only be filled with children."

I bet the people if Gotham feel very protected knowing that the dark knight is watching everything they do. Here in Shropshire we can do one better, our batmen come in two's. I for one feel extremely relaxed knowing they are around even if they are more like the chuckle brothers in costume. Yesterday apart from Opeie changing for a brief craft session the boys stayed in costume all day and were running about solving crimes that I had made up.

After a couple of hours they both started to get a bit tired so we sat down at the table for a bit of craft. The day before while Mrs M was at the gym we went for a walk through the park near by looking for pine cones, me and Opeie had found some last week and bless Seth he wanted to be a part of it. I filled my pockets and as we ventured back to the car and Mrs M, we talked about how we were going to paint the pine cones to look like minions (the boys love despicable me).

I set the paint up along with googly eyes, card and extras and got to it. Firstly if you are going to have a go at this wash the pine cones and leave them to dry. We didn't and as soon as we started poking it with a paint brush all manner of angry bugs came running out. The minion idea turned out to be a great idea as we had left the lids off our paint in the garden during a previous craft activity but had huge bottles of the primary colours.

Okay so it wasn't one of our greatest craft ideas but it kept the boys entertained while the weather was looking pretty bleak outside. We've still got plenty of pine cones left so we will have to think of something else interesting to do with them. The afternoon flew by and before we knew it it was time to pick the boss of the house up from work so the dynamic duo jumped back in to costume, climbed into the Batmobile and the adventure continued!!!

 (Blurry i know but its virtually imposible to take a none blurry picture of two very excited crimefighters )

A couple of quick craft activities to fill the morning. Painitng eggs and making masks.

Because of the great weather we have hardly done any craft activities over the last few weeks, none of us really want to be cooped up indoors, i know i could do it outside but lets be honest its never going to win over a trampoline and a good old fashioned ball. yesterday though Opeie was adamant that he wanted to stay in and colour for the morning so i went hunting through the boys craft boxes. back at Easter time we had brought lots of plain polystyrene eggs, designed and painted a few but didn't end up doing anything with them, there were plenty left over so i got them out for Opeie so we could continue our decorating, still with no idea what we are going to do with them.

We've now ended up with a big box of decorated eggs to play with which I'm sure Seth will find a use for at some point. As Opeie scribbled away at his eggs he gave me clear directions as to which characters he wanted me to create for him...

Opeie soon got bored of colouring eggs and said 'scissors', while pottering round Ikea last week Mrs M picked up a big pack of coloured card for the boys so seeing as Opeie was in a foreman style craft mood dishing out his character requests we started chopping away at the paper to create some masks and Opeie did an excellent job of gluing all the pieces together, in the words of that rather annoying children's program 'wonder pets' that he likes so much, "whats going to work? Teamwork!".

"To create something you must be something."

Today is the first day of Seth's half term and were all so happy to have him at home during the daytime, Opeie especially. It was a morning of craft today and we all had a great time. With Easter coming up our craft plans have all been Easter themed. Were concentrating on getting our new craft blog up and running (giftsfromthepiratescreate.com) at the moment so the completed items that we make will be on there. There's been lots of painting, cutting, sticking and drawing happening today, Seth loves craft and can happily sit for hours creating, Opeie on the other hand has the attention span of a rock but he's happy just playing while were crafting.

After lunch we decided to go and see nanny and grandad as Opeie has been saying 'grandad' over and over again this week. Seth and Opeie really enjoy going to visit them and I'm not surprised, their lovely people and always make such a fuss of the boys. We did some building with our new toys (I'll write about those on the next post), We played hide and seek, watched some family movies of Mrs M when she was a little girl (very cute) and we got to hear grandad play the guitar (while Opeie and Seth helped with the strumming).

...Oh and Seth got to dress up as a bee keeper in Nanny's fancy hat, so all in all an excellent first day to the holiday. Were going to pack as much as we can in to this holiday so be sure to keep checking in on us and be sure to check out the new blog to find out what we've been making for Easter, they will be up soon.