Googley eye invasion

The students in after school seriously love googley eyes. It started with a group of 5th grade girls making these little creatures...

But it soon evolved into boys and girls of all ages rushing to the art cabinet to pillage for eyes, then grabbing at glue guns and attaching eyes to various random objects from the "useful junk" shelf. In addition to the puff-ball creatures that started it all, the students have made plastic bottles with eyes, toilet paper rolls with eyes, glass jars with eyes, and on and on.

Seriously, we can't buy enough googley eyes.
I've been thinking about how exciting it seems to be for the kids to anthropomorphise regular objects by adding these eyes - even trash is suddenly precious when it can look back at you. What is it about adding eyes that is so powerful to these kids? Is it particular to this group of kids? Or is there something in all of us that wants to humanize our surroundings?

It's giving me lots of ideas for future, larger scale projects...