While ago, when my nieces were little bit smaller I would quite often babysit them. To be perfectly honest – it is not my strongest suit. I love them to death, but patience in general is not my thing. At all! So with two girls running around my my nerves were in pieces pretty quickly. Usually we would go outside, ride a bikes, go hike, walk down under the lake, you name it. But it has been winter, and not ant particularly nice one. Instead of white snow - wet, nasty muggy plough.

Instead of sunny frosty days - long, dark afternoons. After 4 days like this kids when berserk. We had all puzzles solved, table top games get boring an repetitive, I managed to even teach girls chess basics. But they were bored. And I refuse to use TV or computer to melt those young, juicy brains just yet, they have time for this.

So I decided to do something, that I know best – drawing. Girls would draw from time to time, but I've never done this in their presence - mostly because I had to have eyes on the back of my head to make sure they are not up to no good ;> So I just took out all pencils, crayons, and whatever I was able to find from my school years at my parents home. Wasn't really that difficult, since my Mum is the most organized person I know:)

And so I did. First one was just regular, pink pig. But I though... yeah, that's boring. So I added a yellow hard-hat. They loved it! So I collected more orders: pig with a bow, fancy, classy Miss-Piggy, Handyman-Pig and so on on. The older one asked if we can make the somehow 3D, so they can play with them. So we cut out all the pigs with the excess paper on the bottom so that we could make the bases they stand on.

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While older one and I was cutting - the youngest come up with idea that we can make houses and enclosures for our newly created characters. She started building with her favourite plastic blocks. I drew more characters, the older one coloured them in, and the youngest was occupied in building. Her project changed several times, which, I must admit, made me very happy, because it meant more minutes of silence:)

We moved from regular occupations to King and Queen of this lovely Pigsville:)And if there is a royal court, there must be a clown (actually a juggler) and a mime. It was truly extraordinary to watch how a whole world was created from imagination and crayons.

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I must admit, I was as invested in the project as girls were. It was real fun, and watching them work in absolute focus and laughing to each other while playing - that was the greatest reward.

And not to be outdone - the girls decided unanimously, we need a bank to pay ourselves 🤣 for all the work. They even made a payment terminal :)