I’m not much into the show and tell mommy-blogging anymore, but we had a really fun afternoon with our best neighbor friends, so I wanted to do a post to preserve the memory.

The kids have been out of school all week, which makes for a lot of hours to fill during the day. My sweet friend who lives two doors down is about 3 weeks away from having her third baby, and her other two are close to Charlotte and Nolan’s ages, so I just have so much empathy for the exhaustion she’s going through. We’ve been trying to have the kids play a lot together, but when we let them just “free play” there is always a lot of intense arguing and a lot of tears. So we decided to have an impromptu Monster-themed craft and movie “party” this afternoon to give the kids a fun few hours but with some structure. It was really easy to throw together and they loved it.

First, we had them paint bags their favorite colors and name their monsters.

Then, they glued on their monsters’ eyes, tongue, teeth, horns and feet.

Then we filled their monster bags with popcorn, and they settled in to watch Monsters Inc., which none of them had ever seen.

Their attention spans aren’t very long, so we paused the movie halfway and did another craft.

They played outside for a few minutes, then (sort of) watched the rest of the movie.

These four can fight and argue like bitter enemies, but they actually love each other so much. I’m so thankful for their sweet friendship, and that we have such great neighbors.