Laying Bricks and Webcam Tricks

We'd planned in advance for a whole week in this week so that Sprout could recoup his energy after last week's frequent outings.

This week has been punctuated more than usual by the boys playing together, cooperatively. For shortish periods, but nice :) They've collaborated on My Singing Monsters, Little Inferno, Dragon City, and CoD among other things. 

Moppet is enjoying the fact that we had a huge clear out and she can find, well, everything, and so has played with, well, everything. Even Gruff's headset.

Squidge chose an arts and crafts comic and made this little monster...

,..and a day and night owl.

Following on from his bricklaying exploits at Blists Hill, I found our Teifoc brick set for Sprout and he got to work.

Moppet and Squidge and his friend and I meanwhile set up a den. Sprout later made his own one too.

He's had the chalks out and has been designing...

...including this likeness of The Sandman :)

Squidge has been joining in some, and also doing lots of "Look no hands!" and "Look no feet!" and the like on his bike.

Sprout saved his money for two months so that he could go to Smyths and have more choice of Lego. He went last night with Gruff and chose a new Agents set and a couple of Mixels to complete a combo he's been aiming for. He saved one to build with me this morning :)

While we built Lego, Moppet did some painting...

...and Squidge played some CoD with his friend.

Later on while Sprout played on his xbox with an old friend, Squidge and Moppet played outside for a while, Squidge on his bike with his friends and Moppet with her new friend in the street who also likes playing dolls and is much older than her but very sweet to her :)

After his bicycle-powered smoothie making at the weekend, Sprout asked me to get similar ingredients. We already had frozen raspberries from the garden, and some pineapple in the fridge, so I went and got some bananas and he whizzed them all up together. He made enough for everyone :)

After everyone else was in bed one night Sprout and I stayed up again and watched Rise of the Guardians. He was telling me about a game that also has the sandman in it and the sequel which is going to have the boogeyman in it. He also noticed that one of he characters has lost the same tooth he has :)

After the film we watched the next episode of Nature's Weirdest Events and he chatted to me about hailstones and natural disasters and fish and birds and mating urges and sadness and sardines. He declared a murmuration of starlings 'momentous'. He told me about Minecraft sunsets and their timings, and compared the colour to the light pollution he could see outside our house. He daydreamed out loud about scuba diving on a coral reef, and asked about when Ben and I had gone diving before he was born. He asked me if I'd ever experienced a natural disaster and I told him about a hurricane from when I was a kid, and that moved on to trees falling on cars which led to palm trees and coconuts which led to videogame mods. 

Sprout has done a lot of gaming, mostly zombies on CoD, Little Big Planet 2 community levels, and GTA V with as many cheats as we could find :)

Squidge and Moppet did some more hooping with their homemade hoops.

I surprised Sprout with Yoostar (a Kinect game where you can put yourself into film clips) that he'd watched Pewdiepie play, and he started by putting himself in the place of Spartacus...

...but with a bit of departure from the original script :)

Moppet tried after, and then Sprout did it again with The Mummy and then Terminator. Much laughter :)

Sprout and I found the Far Cry 3 level editor hidden away in a folder somewhere, so he's been designing his own levels and trying them out.

So basically, we haven't done much this week but chill out at home, play games, have *lots* of snuggly time and film nights, have friends round, and have *loads* of conversations about everything from whether there really are gun shops everywhere you look in the USA to what colour sand is and why. :)

After backing their Indiegogo campaign last year we received the MUCH awaited Facerig activation code, and Sprout spent the afternoon alternating between being a demon and a raccoon :)

 

Moppet and Mac had a sleep together...

...and the boys played some more LIttle Inferno, which led to the question of whether people eat locust eggs, which we couldn't find any record of but we did find these pictures of fried locusts, yum!

Somehow that moved onto Chinchillas (not eating them!), and what size they are compared to guinea pigs.

Squidge and his friends made some Nerf targets out of cardboard boxes and put up a shooting range.

Including Squidge as a moving target!

We tried the milk, food colouring and dish soap experiment, which wasn't quite as spectacular w#as we'd seen online...

Sprout did some drawing in his 'ancient' Minecraft book that we made last year.

He showed me this picture of how he'd envisaged the character's souls from the Ib game. 

And the different temperaments of the characters.

We downloaded Mine-imator for Sprout to play with and make some Minecraft animations.

Sprout made some patterns out of his Tetris Jenga blocks and commented that the pattern looked similar to Isaac from Venturian's logo.

He then noticed too that it reminded him of the Illuminati symbol, which he knows from one of his videogames. 

He and I played some Scribblenauts unlimited, with lots of things made from diamond, and lots of things using the adjectives 'giant' and 'flying' :) Then he decided to draw something to send to Pewdiepie.

Then we did some silly photos :)

And then he went down to the fields with his friends and brought this flower back for me <3 p="">

Moppet played with her new friend next door and kept bringing her toys to show me.

Squidge watched some Cirque de Soleil...

...played *lots* of Dragon City and Little Inferno, and a bit of CoD...

...and played a game where he passed me different Skylanders cards and I had to tell him what they said. 

They all made 'stained glass windows' with wax paper and Sharpies.

We all made some loom bands.

And Squidge painted his own face. Several times. :)

(Sorry about the layout being even more all over the place than usual today, the Blogger app has started refusing to upload any photos (which is primarily how I get everything on here!) so I've had to jump on the PC in fits and spurts to put things on.)