Last day of the Hols...birthdays and puppets...

...a bit of what we did!

We went and saw 'Hare Brain' at the wonderful Spare Parts Puppet Theatre...actually, I saw it 5 times, because I volunteered to help out for a couple of days, ushering, taking tickets, vacuuming the foyer and making sure the loos were kept well stocked with loo paper (very important when you've got lots of very small bladders in the audience!)  I have to say, I enjoyed it every time, and laughed at the 'blue lettuce' joke as much on the 5th as the 1st time.  The Spare Parts people generously gave free tickets to volunteer helpers, so I took my girls on my smallest munchkin's 7th (eeek, when did that happen!?) birthday.  Spare Parts is a WA institution, celebrating their 30th birthday this year...I'm looking forward to their next season!

And that birthday...I don't know how it happened, I'm sure she was 2 just last week!

Daddy and his girls!

Daddy decided to help blow out the candles...and there were great exclamations of "DADDY!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Followed by the 'Connect Four' tournament.  It looks like bigger munchkin has just lost to Daddy, but smallest did well against Grandad (and they both beat me...without any help...on several occasions...oh embarrassment!)

Smallest munchkin went Goblin Hunting...apparently this is the regulation GH uniform.

Biggest joined the pirates.

Inspired by 'Hare Brain' and to combat the 'I'm bored!' syndrome, we made some (rather odd) puppets.  Faeries of course.  Not quite finished, but never mind.

Finally, just when you think you've tired them out and can afford to sit down with a good book...you make the mistake of saying 'well, you've got mummy and daddy home today, what do you want to do?" And biggest says "Lets make a movie!"

Ahhh...ummmm...hmmmmm...okaaaaaaaaay...I guess we can do that...

Biggest had great 'Cecil B. De Mille' yearnings, involving everyone getting dressed up as Princesses and Princes (hmmm, if you can convince daddy to dress up, you're a better woman than I am, sweetheart!!), and doing Cinderella...on location in the front yard!  Given the cast of thousands required (the Ball scene) plus all the trained mice and birds, I managed to steer her to a slightly lower budget (think cool, indi and hip) style, and Little Red Riding Hood instead (only needing a cast of 4).  It was hilarious really, I do wish I could show you, but our video camera really is a VIDEO camera, circa 1999, and needs to be wound up with a large brass key and fed dusty little cassette-type things that some say can only be found these days in the very bottom of old leather suitcases belonging to ladies who go exploring while wearing button-up boots and crinolines.  Luckily, we had a couple on hand!  A whole day and a half was spent making sets, props, costumes...and casting (very important, you have to consider things such as...is Barbie too tall for our leading man?), while filming took all of half an hour.  So here are some 'stills' from the epic production of 'Little Red Riding Hood'!

And a good time was had by all!

What else did I do...?  Oh yes, I turned the 'spare room' into a 3rd bedroom, so my girls have a room each now...which is very exciting for them.  Alas, as I'm sure you all know, there actually is no such thing as a 'spare room'...stuff tends to expand to fit the available space.  Which means that everything that was IN the so-called spare room is now NOT in it.  

So at the end of the school holidays I have about 3 weeks worth of house-cleaning to catch up on...as well as the Herculean task of trying to find the lounge room floor beneath all the stuff excavated out of the spare room.  There's layers and layers of it to go through...I wonder if Time Team would be interested?!