Ruddy Glitter and Ruddy Glue.

It all happened quite spontaneously.

There was a mountain of various bits of cardboard cr*p behind the kitchen door - empty egg cartons, kitchen roll holders, shoe boxes and a few of the students' empty ruddy Pringles crisps tubes. (The children aren't allowed them - have you seen the ingredients on those things?!).

And within minutes of me expressing a desire to shift some of it to the recycling bin, there was ruddy glitter and ruddy glue, ruddy everywhere.

Am I the only woman in the world who hates craft?

The eldest had been given a school project to make a Space Landscape.  Even we could cope with that scope, it would be reasonable to have thought - espcially with the six weeks notice we'd been given, which meant we couldn't even get out of it by whining about not being given enough time.

Gah!

So we'd been collecting cardboard cr*p all this time, very little of which he wished to use when the time came to get our craft on.

Suddenly, pale blue felt was required, together with coloured card and acrylic paints, stuff that can't be found in this house, sorry.

We argued about what constitutes craters and (him) why a loo roll holder (which we hadn't collected) was better that a kitchen roll one, but it was his call and it all had to fit inside one shoe box, so why couldn't I recycle the rest?!

He had quite a set, but brilliant, idea in his mind but neither of the poor boys realise their mother is cr*p at craft.  The only thing I'm capable of sticking on is a smile and some fake bonhomie.  We paint and draw and colour, but that's my limit and, on this particular occasion, we were supposed to be going swimming.

We never made it.

But we did make this without any major falling out or forking out on stuff which will enforce further craft hell in future.

Ruddy craft. His space project. 

It's amazing what you can find when you put your mind to it, isn't it?  We sourced unused star stickers for reward charts (which tells you a bit about their behaviour lately!) and cut up a black sparkly gift bag.  We used UHU and sellotape instead of what probably should have been a Pritt stick (because we don't own one, so shoot me now) and found a make-your-own-sock-puppet pack that had never been opened (surprise!) which shed glitter all over the place, but gave us something to gather up and glue down to make some sky.

There was some weird alien looking tissue paper that had come with someone's shoes one day, which I'd kept, knowing we had this coming up and we nicked some play-doh legs off something or other.

And, naturally, as soon as we'd got cracking, the youngest decided he wanted to torture me too, because he needed to make a rocket and a landscape as well.  Simultaneously, obviously, and to the same spec. with identical materials.,

We never made that either.

If we'd planned it, instead of putting it off and, perhaps, done it on the protected dining table instead of getting glitter within the grooves of the kitchen floor (which isn't such a bad look to be honest!) and been more patient with each other, because we weren't rushing to get on with what we'd originally said we were going to do, then they might have enjoyed it so much they'd want to do it again.

So all's well that ends well!

It was fun, but not that much fun ;)