"Seriously, Unicorn Haemorrhoids? The glitter gets EVERYWHERE!"

Last week Mrs M came home from work desperate to show us all a video on Youtube for a product called the 'Squatty Potty'. For those of you unfamiliar with the Squatty Potty and its crazy unicorn video viewed 17m times on Youtube, here its is...

The video has become a hit around the house and has spurred on many fun quotes over the last week or so. For the first time in a while too the boys have actually asked if we can review one through the blog (So if you are reading this Squatty Potty, We're up for trying it out).

Today while pottering around the house (because it was so cold outside), Opeie requesting possible his must bizarre LEGO building session and asked if we could make a quick Squatty Potty scene. I like to think I'm quite accommodating with the boys ideas so we set to work armed with a lot of bright colours and a unicorn, enjoy.

"The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal."

I am so behind with the posts I want to write as I am building something awesome with a friend of mine (all will be revealed next week). With our last post looking at Matisse and it being a bit of a flop with Opeie during our 'Art week', We asked Mrs M who our next artist should be and she decided on Wassily Kandinsky as she loved his pieces using circles. So we had a chat about it and decided to make an installation using anything we could find around the house that was circular. This instantly had Opeie motivated and a lot more interested than our previous day of art. 

Ive started yo-yoing recently as I loved it as a kid (I'm not very good but time will hopefully change that), so they were first for our collection along with plates, bowls, sticky tape, LEGO (of course) and all the lids we could find.

Opeie is loving disco lights and balls at the moment, so to add an a little more glamour to our piece we included Opeie's new Micro Scooter Wheel Whizzers, these things are awesome by the way but there will be more about those over the next few weeks.

With a huge pile of circles to play with we set about recreating our very own 'Circles in a circle'. 

Our Kandinsky exercise was great for teaching Opeie that with art there is no right or wrong way to do things. I love just leaving him to do his own thing and knowing that 'anything can be art' really gives him confidence in what he is doing.

Spending a morning playing with circles had Opeie looking around the house for other groups of circles. You can find art anywhere!

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

Well there was bound to be one day during our 'Art week' that Opeie wasn't all that bothered about, Cutting shapes out of a piece of coloured paper and sticking them down was never going to have the same appeal to a 4 year old as throwing paint around the garden but the whole idea of the week was to show Opeie some different art styles and to show that pretty much anything can be deemed as art.

Our artist of the day was Henri Matisse and his paper cut out style of art. We started with a piece of coloured/patterned paper, cut shapes out and flipped and mounted them on a larger piece of white paper making positive and negative shapes. It was a nice quick activity but as I said Opeie didn't really get in to today's art so I'm going to have to really think about something more entertaining for our next activity.

Our morning of Matisse ending in Opeie doing multi coloured scribbles and us creating a fox paper aeroplane so in the end a great start to a day of creativity.

"To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect."

Continuing our week of art and with yesterday's Jackson Pollock paint flicking activity in the garden going so well, we moved on to a new artist with a completely different artistic medium. Alexander Calder was our artist of today and Opeie was looking forward to having some of his creations suspended from the ceiling.

We started by drawing some obscure shapes on different coloured sheets of paper. Then our friends Sam and Jamie visited, so Sam joined in and helped. We cut the shapes out and using transparent cord made a hole in each shape and thread it through. We used 3 straws and tied one of our shapes to each of the 6th ends. Our creation was really droopy which was great as it gave me a chance to explain balance to Opeie and how we shift the weight along the straw to suspend the piece evenly.

The end result was really effective and it was great seeing Opeie's art delicately sway as we opened doors or passed by. It was an important lesson for Opeie in art as he understands more now that art can be created in many forms. We'll definitely be doing this again when Opeie is a little older using wire or metal rods and shapes made of different materials. Calder's other works include wire sculptures which we will also be attempting at some point soon. 

Tomorrows artist in our week of art will be Henri Matisse so stay tuned.

"My painting does not come from the easel"

Since our recent visit to the Tate modern a few weeks back Opeie has developed a new love of art. So much so that he has informed me that when he grows up he now wants to be an artist and wear a pencil behind his ear, which is a big change from the palaeontologist/rockstar that he wanted to be for the past year. During the Tate visit Opeie took a shine to Piet Mondrian's simple grid style pieces using the three primary colours and couldn't wait to get home and recreate the piece in his favourite media, LEGO.

This week at 'Daddy school' we have decided to embrace his new interest and have an 'Art week'. Researching artists and their styles and then having a go ourselves, a different artist for each day. To kick start our week of creativity we chose Jackson Pollock, simply because Opeie liked the sound of flicking paint all over the place. Firstly though Mrs M had to make him look like an artist. So with a dashing moustache that Dali would be proud of we began our artistic endeavours.

I love that most pound shops these days stock A4 or A3 canvas' and I usually keep some in the house for these kind of activities. I found an empty box to fit the canvas into to try and contain some of the paint splashes and then we found all of the paint and brushes we could find in the house. As soon as Opeie started flicking that paint around he was completely focused and he was loving the art that we were creating together.

 

After going through the variety of colours we had in the house we turned the activity on to colour mixing which was a great lesson for our budding little artist. The finished piece came out so much better than I was expecting and most importantly Opeie was really proud of the work he had created.

In 2006, Pollock's piece No.5 which he had created in 1948 became the worlds most expensive painting, when it was sold for $140 million. So I'll be holding on to this for the future, just in case.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

Being an atheist family we do our best to avoid religion at all costs but with Seth's school filling him with all that is holy we do have to attend the occasional choir service. Because of this the names of the big players in the world of Christianity do tend to crop up every now and again and have been recognised by the smallest of my own disciples. Today in awesome Opeie style, he tells me (in quite a serious voice) "dad! 'Jesus' is in this music video!". Shocked and curious to find out who he thought this mythical guy was I walked across the room for a look, instantly almost spraying the walls with coffee that was bursting through my lips (luckily I just choked instead). Opeie had paused the video to show me and there on the screen was the latest incarnation of the big man himself.

He seems to have let himself go since I was at school.

"We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to beable to stay."

The Super Mario Maker buzz is still going strong in our home and it has clearly become Seth's favourite game from 2015. He will happily spend the time he has while doing his physio creating interesting courses for us to play. When he's not creating though he loves searching the awesome course world for creative courses to play as there is a huge selection.

Seth came out of school recently and told us that he had been watching a Dick and Dom show in class and really enjoyed watching them wreck a full size remote control car, so he was really excited when I told him that they had created 3 Super Mario Maker levels that could be downloaded in the course world and I had the codes.

Being a huge Mario fan myself Ive loved playing all of the games so far but Super Mario Maker really does have that something special and i love all the hype that's been attached to it along with all the great collaborations come with it too (like the Mercedes Benz level). Dick and Dom definitely did the game justice. If you want to attempt their levels yourself here are their codes:

Dick's level - F15E-0000-0114-40CD

Dom's level - 9C14-0000-0108-C0F9 

Dick and Dom's co-created level - C78F-0000-0124-C6FB

 Happy gaming.

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."

After all of the excitement of the Christmas holiday it has been a smooth transition back in to our weekly routine of adventuring for me and Opeie and school runs and making sure Seth has everything he needs. Going back to school wasn't all doom and gloom for Seth though as  it gave us the chance to get back in to meeting him from school on our Micro scooters and adventuring around the local lake. We don't live anywhere near the school so we can't scoot home. Instead me and Opeie park the car a distance away and pack Seth's folded scooter into my backpack and tie the zips together to hold it in place (stylish).

Last week me and Opeie scooted to the school and could see Seth in his classroom getting ready to come out. When Seth got to he said that his friends had said "woah! is that your step dad? his scooter is awesome!". I maybe the cool scooting step dad now but it will soon be the embarrassing scooting step dad during his teenage years I expect, so I'll lap up all the cool points I can get now haha.

After a day of school, the scooters are great for taking in all the things outdoors, talking about the weather, the animals we can see and planning all the things we are going to be doing throughout the week, Scooting is perfect father/Son bonding time. It is also great for burning off that excess energy and giving Seth a chance to let out his crazy side.

Happy scooting ya'll.

 

"Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars."

Despite the coldness and having to layer up this time of year, there is something so exciting for the kids when the temperature drops, especially first thing in the morning. being able to look out of the window and see what has frozen over is great. Opeie spotted a bowl of rocks from the beach that we had left outside and he was fascinated by the sheet of ice on top and the cold water sitting below.

It didn't take long for the ice to melt, especially as Opeie had been stabbing it with a knife so we ventured out into the garden to see what else had frozen over. Luckily we had nor really done mush in the garden so any container that was left out there was full of water from the rain and had a great frozen sheet across the top. Our frozen finds had us taking a trip to the supermarket for balloons and food colouring to fill up and leave outside for making bright coloured ice orbs. Sadly it wasn't quite cold enough last night and tonight's weather is looking the same, so we've now given them a head start in the freezer Brrrrrrrr!

"Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody"

It was no surprise that after our trip to the Tate, Opeie wanted to recreate his favourite pieces in LEGO. A great activity for exploring neoplasticism.