There are few things in the world Ebony loves more than arts and crafts. Give her a paintbrush, some paints and some blank paper and she’ll be entertained for ages. She loves getting messy, she loves being creative and she loves making new masterpieces to display on her noticeboard. She loves cutting, sticking and drawing. When I reorganised her playroom, I created a craft corner for her. There’s a table, all of her art supplies and plenty of paper. I often walk into the room to find her knee-deep in some kind of creative independent play, with paper strewn all around her and a pile of favourites to go up on the wall.
With the weather turning awful, we’ve been spending more times indoors lately. Over the past few weeks, we’ve enjoyed quite a few afternoons of arts and crafts, hiding away from the rain and covering ourselves in glitter. We’ve made homemade Christmas cards, gingerbread decorations for the tree and done plenty of Bonfire Night themed crafts. It almost makes the bad weather bearable.
Ocean Finance recently offered to send us an eco cardboard igloo for us to decorate, and it sounded like the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon. We decided to decorate the igloo while Laurie was away. He was away with work for three nights a couple of weekends ago, so we had plenty of fun activities planned to keep us busy. We went to watch the Christmas lights be switched on (well, almost, there was a technical hitch), had a pub lunch with friends and spent the day with her best friend. On the Sunday we got up early and spent a couple of hours decorating the igloo. We didn’t watch even a second of television all weekend, which I thought was pretty impressive. Of course, Ebony didn’t quite agree. After doing a million fun things throughout the weekend, I asked her what her favourite bit was and she replied: “Watching a movie, but we didn’t get to do that. SIGH.”
The igloo is huge. Like, seriously huge. It has filled the entire playroom, I probably need to reorganise the room again to get it all to fit in there a little better. It took a while to put it up, but once I was finished Ebony was itching to get started on the decorations. We used plenty of glitter, loads of blue paint and some sponges and brushes to decorate each side of the igloo. Ebony ended up covered in paint, but had lots of fun decorating the igloo. It’s now the new home where she lives with all of her babies and the cat who often joins them.