Getting Started with the Whole Idea
You know how it is sometimes, right? The kids are around, and you’re racking your brain trying to pull them away from screens. My niece was visiting last Saturday, and honestly, I was fresh out of ideas. The usual stuff just wasn’t cutting it. Then, it hit me. I remembered messing about with words when I was her age, not serious or anything, just fun. So, I thought, why not try a bit of what I’m now calling ‘niece poetry’?
The Actual Process – Or, How We Muddled Through
First things first, I had to get her interested. That was a bit of a challenge, gotta admit. Cartoons are a powerful magnet. I didn’t push it, just sort of casually started scribbling some silly thoughts myself on a notepad I found lying around. Used a half-dead pen, the kind you have to shake a lot. Classic.
Then I started asking her really simple, daft questions. Things like, “If your teddy bear could go on holiday, where would it go?” or “What does a rainbow taste like?” She gave me some funny answers, as you’d expect. I just jotted them down, exactly as she said them. No corrections, no trying to make it sound ‘poetic’.
- One was about her cat wanting “more crunchy dreams.”
- Another described a “grumpy cloud that needed a nap.”
The ‘poetry’ bit was pretty loose. Mostly, I just tried to group her little phrases together. Sometimes I’d read them back to her, and she’d giggle or add another line. It wasn’t about rhyme or rhythm, not really. It was more like catching tiny, shiny thoughts.
What Came Out of It – More Than Just Words
We ended up with a few pages of this stuff. Some lines were pure gold, from a kid’s perspective, you know? Like, she said happiness was “the color of yellow sunshine mixed with blue ice cream.” Can’t argue with that.
But the best part wasn’t the ‘poems’ themselves. It was watching her get into it. After a while, she wasn’t just answering my questions; she started pointing at things and making up her own funny descriptions. That was the real win, seeing her little creative gears turn.
It kind of reminds me of this one time I was trying to get a really stubborn old plant to bloom in my garden. Tried everything, almost gave up. Then one morning, bam, a tiny little bud. Same sort of quiet satisfaction, you know? Not a big firework display, just a nice little spark.
So, yeah, that was my little experiment with ‘niece poetry’. Nothing fancy, no masterpieces created. Just a good, simple way to spend an afternoon, talking and laughing. Way better than another hour of mindless TV, if you ask me. We even stuck some of the ‘poems’ on the fridge with a dodgy magnet. Proper art gallery stuff, that.
