The daughters got involved in today’s make something assignment. That means we twisted the prompt a little and complicated the process a lot … but we had a great time.

The suggestion was to make something you could walk on. Right away, Emma invented a character. We would not do the walking. Instead, a pencil would wander along a path, meeting various objects of interest on the way to a piece of paper.

A procrastinating pencil? I’m in!

Both girls have been playing with stop motion video apps on their iPads. Hannah introduced me to her favorite, and I added Stop Motion Studio to my iPad (because, of course, their iPads are both charging after hours of Minecraft). Then we set the scene: a path of white paper across the family room floor, littered with a series of “distractions” that might keep us from writing:

• Chocolate: Mmm. Now that you mention it, I am hungry!
• iPhone: I wonder what a Google search will find when I enter “writing.”
• A broken pencil: Poor baby needs to be sharpened.
• Hand lotion: My hands are so dry. And now that I’ve moisturized, they’re wet. Must wait for this to dry before I can possibly begin to write.
• Book: Perhaps a little inspiration from other authors will help.
• Car: I’ll just run a few errands first.

We captured photos of the pencil encountering all these items, then composed them into a very simple stop-motion video. It’s not sophisticated, but it does tell a story. And now that I know how to use this simple technology, I see so many other opportunities to use it.

Rest assured, the story has a happy ending. At the end of the procrastination path, the pencil discovers a notebook and, at last, begins to write.

Don’t we all?