A Midsummer Night's Crowning Glory

Forgot to blog yesterday. It was a bit of a blur, come to think of it. We were very busy with work in the morning, then in the afternoon we went to Romy's to play in her paddling pool, which Emily loved because it was full of ball pool balls floating on the top. Unfortunately, it wouldn't stop raining, and Romy was quite poorly, so we left a bit early, but still had fun. Hopefully Romy's feeling better by now.

Today started off with more mental maths, and then Emily read this Usborne version of A Midsummer Night's Dream to me. She decided she wanted to act out part of it, but before we could do that, we had to make a crown for the fairy Queen Titania - after getting covered with gold spray paint and learning to loathe unco-operative crepe paper, Emily produced this lovely end result:

Lunchtime followed, and straight after lunch I normally catch up with a bit of work for half an hour or so while Emily plays and Jon goes to the post office (again). She was awfully quiet, so I wondered what she was up to, and discovered her in her bedroom happily designing scenery for the play! She got all her paints out and did a lovely woodland scene which we taped up under her bed as the backdrop. We re-read the Usborne book and dipped into a couple of other versions of the play to work out what we were doing, then Emily changed into a fairy queen costume and I found something to use as a Donkey's head....yep, guess who got to play Bottom. Well, to be fair, I was playing Oberon too, but I think I excelled at Bottom!

After a quick practice, we were ready for our appreciative audience of Daddy videoing the performance. We didn't have enough people to do more than the Titania/Oberon/Bottom/Puck parts, but I think it had a certain charm, lol. It was really lovely to see Emily totally driving something herself, from start to finish, as the whole thing had been her idea and mostly organised on her own. A couple of pictures of Titania awakening on her bed of flowers:

and posing in front of her scenery:

This Shakespeare interest looks set to run and run, and we've now got plans to do the same thing for several other plays - make a few props, paint some scenery and act out a short bit. Emily's such a perfectionist, though, bless her. In part of the Usborne book it said something like "Titania awoke with a start. 'Was that an angel waking me?' she asked." Our little Shakespeare fan piped up with "It's not supposed to say that! She's supposed to say 'What angel has awakened me from my flowery bed?'". So there!