Artistic Licence

Took BallFiend and Thumper to the local library for their Storytime session: half an hour or so of stories, songs and craft activities for 3 to 5 year olds. I've always planned to take BallFiend to this, since he turned 3, but being heavily pregnant and then busy with newborn Thumper, today was the first time I actually got there.

I decided to go on the bus -- the stop is just across the road from my house and it's only a 5 minute ride to the library, plus for BallFiend the bus is an exciting adventure. We only had to wait TWENTY MINUTES for it each way! And because I just missed a bus home by a mere 5 minutes, had to buy a second 2-hour ticket. So I had to pay for all day travel for the privilege of traveling a total of 10 minutes. [No wonder people complain about the crappy PT around Melbourne].

Being Summer holidays, today's theme was the beach. "Who's been to the beach" asked the librarian leading the session. "ME!!" yelled BallFiend at the top of his lungs. He continued to answer every question in this manner - making loud and spurious claims about his prior experiences at the beach.

BallFiend enjoyed listening to the stories, interrupting frequently with his 'why?' questions. He got annoyed with the songs (classics such as Incy Wincy Spider, Hey Diddle Diddle Row Row Your Boat and Baa Baa Black Sheep); though Thumper loved them. And he really enjoyed doing the craft activity with me. We were challenged to make an under-sea collage using nothing more than the power of our imaginations... and some craft supplies (photocopied pictures of sea creatures, shiny paper, crepe paper, cellophane, sparkles, stickers, etc.). And I am so proud of our masterpiece, that I have decided to publish a picture of it here, for the world to see.

Yes, that is a dinosaur in the bottom left corner -
who knows why there is a dinosaur under the sea,
but BallFiend asked for one, so I duly cut one out.
Also true to form, BallFiend insisted on including
a beach ball (top left corner).

PS. BallFiend's toilet training is still going well and he demonstrated his skills by remembering to tell me when he needed to go to the toilet while we were at the library. I left Thumper in the care of the Storytime librarian and raced him off to the loo (which required negotiating a path through the kids and crafts all over the floor, exiting the library building and locating the toilets in the adjacent building). I was so proud of BallFiend for holding on all the way to the toilet (and very relieved!) -- I think I was more excited than he was.
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