Lights! Camera! Action!

Today the girls attended their very first drama workshop. Ms. Didi, who also runs the monthly library arts/crafts hour, is an accomplished stage director and invited the girls to come to the free workshop. For 45 minutes, Ms. Didi taught them the fundamentals of stage acting ("when you're on stage, it's a big 'no no' to wave to your mom or dad in the audience!"). The kids got to wear costumes, say some lines, and of course - dance to a musical number while "swimming" across the stage. Since the organization sponsoring the acting workshop received a grant from Pepsi, we all got some free product afterwards (although the kids had to pose with the product for a picture). Marketing in America, right?

At home, we are always treated to concerts. I was tickeld by their innovative Tinkertoy microphones. =) This was from yesterday's performance.

Mika wrote her first song called, "the Dance of Love". It really helps when she writes the words down, because today the girls tried to sing a new number, "the Love song" but Marika - apparently - was not taught any of the lyrics. By the end, I was confused and not sure if the song was about sisters, or bugs, or what...!

The girls are becoming more creative - learning how to embellish! - which I enjoy seeing. These were the "gifts" distributed at their concert today. Inside, we received a huge number of bookmarks. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I can't read more than 3 books at one time... =P

And speaking of gifts... I wanted to make a special thank you gift for my good friend Holly, who kindly took care of Daisy (our guinea pig) while we were in Arizona. Daisy is a special high-maintenance guinea pig, because she absolutely refuses to drink out of her water bottle. I don't know what her problem is!

So here is what I made Holly - it's a baking mix with almost everything in it - she just has to add butter, milk and some vanilla extract (I think) to make some chocolate cobbler. What is it, you ask? I had no idea, so we had to test-drive the recipe last night and let me tell you - IT WAS DELICIOUS! It's like chocolate cake/brownie with some chocolate sauce. We ate it with some vanilla ice cream and yum yum YUM!

I know you're all dying to know how I came up with this wondrous creation. I didn't! Last week, the YSS blog mentioned the Lollychops blog with regards to making tea toters. I looked around the blog and this woman is AMAZING. She's very crafty and she has several beautiful free downloadable printables for making special gifts - these will come in handy when it comes time to making teacher appreciation gifts, or even holiday gifts.

So in other words, you follow Lollychops' directions to pack the mixtures, print out the template to make the packaging and voila! You have allowed your friend to make a scrumptious dessert with minimal effort. How cool is that?