Things I have been etcetera-ing Part 5

Last one and this one involves shiny buttons and foil and spray adhesive. A heady mix, I think we can all agree.

Things I’ve been doing to stay sane number 6: constructing robot overlords

My kids have an ongoing obsession with robots. They build them from Duplo. They build them from Lego. They construct towering robotic monsters from magnet tiles and occasionally they like to make terrifyingly shiny and mildly lopsided carboard box robots with egg carton arm-wings. And sometimes they rope me in to help.

It is a source of endless bafflement and frustration to them that these creations remain unable to simply get up and walk around like the robots they’ve seen on telly. I have tried explaining about batteries and the lack thereof, but they will have none of it.

In any case, we spent a very pleasant half a day yesterday turning a number of boxes into some truly fabulous robotic creations and it provided a most welcome source of relief from feeling ill. Though that may well have been the fumes from the spray adhesive. Lordy, that stuff is nasty, even sprayed outside. Worse than the spray paint.

Anyway, look on their works ye mighty and beware. I give you Robots Featherhead (Esme), Beep Bop Boop (Elias), and … actually, I cannot for the life of me remember what Orlaith’s is called but it was something ridiculously wonderfully inappropriate and pompous like Mr Lemonspritzler. She has a nice way with names, that one.

These were such fun to make. Esme did hers by herself and apparently Robot Featherhead is bigger than a city and likes rescuing people if they fall out of places. Elias tells me that Beep Bop Boop is sometimes a bad guy but that when you press a button he turns good again and stops being angry.

Getting these guys to stay still for a photo is actually a far greater challenge than getting their robots to move.

And Orlaith spent quite a long time painstakingly sticking buttons on every side of her robot costume. and working out weird funny dance routines for pretty much every one.

The other two think it’s hilarious watching a robot sing opera and wiggle its bottom and I’m inclined to agree.

And that, my friends, is that. A somewhat haphazard record of some of the things I’ve been doing while trying retain my all too tenuous grasp on sanity. It’s not exhaustive. As well as all this we’ve been playing with playdough, wrestling, reading a LOT of books, wrestling and fighting some more, watching a hell of a lot of tv, shouting a bit, doing laps of the garden, wrestling a little more and shrieking. But none of that photographs particularly well. Nor is it easy to cover any of those things in mountains of duct tape and shiny paper. Shame, really.  I do love a bit of duct tape and shiny paper.