Janice 2.0

This weekend I had the privilege of hanging out with my niece Madison. We were finally celebrating her 9th birthday after some scheduling conflicts.

Madison has been patiently waiting to work on a scrapbook with me and for months has been asking me to help her set up a blog. I thought this was such a cute idea.

We spent a few hours at a local scrapbook store and she was so excited to create her layouts. I was impressed with her progress and by the time we left she had done 18 pages!

As luck would have it, London's Santa Claus parade was this weekend. So after a quick dinner we were off to scout out a spot for the parade. We saw lots of Christmasy characters and enjoyed some hot chocolate from the thermos.

Madison is such a neat kid. I'm impressed with how mature she is and the way she handles herself. We had some interesting discussions this weekend and I'm proud of how compassionate she is for others. She has really great ideas and is a smart cookie when it comes to naming provincial capitals, times tables and spelling.

The best part about our time together was creating her blog. She was so excited. It is a private blog so only people on her "readers list" can access it, but I'm going to include her first entry here. On the way home she sat in the back seat of the car and wrote a list of topics she's going to blog about. When I asked her to read the list to me, I was impressed.

• my first blogging experience
• feelings
• my Mom
• all about me
• animals

I thought that was fantastic for a nine year old! When I dropped her off, I told Steve I thought she was becoming Janice 2.0 with her new interests of scrapbooking, blogging ...and did I mention she likes the Beatles?!

Madison's first post:

For my first scrapbooking day me and my dad had to drive to Lambeth. When we got there I saw my aunt Janice. The scrapbooking place was called Memories on Main.  I got a scrapbooking kit for Christmas from aunt Janice. We had lots of fun scrapbooking with lots of smiles and laughs. The scrapbooking owner had a dog named Paige (that's my middle name). I wish we could go scrapbooking again. Their kid James helped me with scrapbooking. 

When we got back we had pizza for supper. Then we went to the Santa Claus parade. When we were there we had hot chocolate. Last in the parade was Santa. Before Santa we saw the Grinch twice.  It was so much fun going to the Santa Claus parade. When we got home we watched some Cloudy With The Chance of Meatballs.

Aunt Janice is helping me with this blog. Stay tuned for my next blog post.