MamaStories

I purchased a cheap set of watercolors at the pharmacy a couple of days back and introduced them to Amie. The medium is of course very different to what she’s used to: those thick, goopy acrylics as well as crayons and color pencils, all of which stays more or less where you put it down.

Not so watercolors, and Amie loves it. She likes its unexpected ways, and its “colorly”-ness. She also enjoys the choice of all those colors, right there, for her. She doesn’t need Mama to squeeze paint from the five bottles of acrylic, to mix them up (with mixed results). She just needs jar of water and “presto, we’re all set” (don’t know where she picked that up). And there’s water involved! She religiously washes her brush before she stabs at a new color. She’s been painting people so the pink is already pretty much used up.

The people she draws now have bodies most of the time, and clothes. She’s serious about the skirts, pants and shoes. Often time she paints pants, and then legs, too. O yes, and all must have a bow tie! Everyone she draws - men, women, babies - must have a bow tie.

Of this person she said “his shoes are tied together!” The light pink circle on top is what is visible of the head. The darker pink oval underneath is his bow tie.

Amie now loves two-step artwork. She painted the Deep Blue Sea and was excited about waiting for it to dry before she added Baby Beluga. She sang the song throughout the process.

After reading a Caillou book about growing carrots (which is the only edible vegetable in her book), she also wanted to make a sign. She drew the carrot paying close attention to a picture of a carrot. Then we stuck it to a stick, so it can mark where she sowed the seeds. No real seeds yet, I’m afraid, so she sows them in the bedcover. Then she also needed a marker for herself, of course!

This is an old one of mine. So much fun, all those lines! But I doubt Amie would let me finish such a detailed drawing… maybe now she will…

Drawing a little bird:

And a ladybug:

Lots of legs, with feet: check. Eyes: check. Mouth: check. Ears? Hair? Check and check.

I promised to put up the video of Amie drawing this picture. I just managed to upload it onto youtube. Have a look-see!

It’s a bit long (5 minutes) but the demonstration is followed by a not-to-be-missed review of most of Amie’s “people” drawings.

Enjoy!

Amie loves this quality drawing paper. It is stiff so it won’t buckle under the pressure of her pen, and it’s smooth, sucking up the Tombow’s ink just right. Expensive materials for a two-and-a-half-year-old, true, but it’s worth it. The only thing that bothers me is that the paper is a bit larger than letter-size. Amie utilizes the page from edge to edge, so when I scan it some part of the image is cut off.

She now automatically draws bodies and attaches the arms and legs to them. I’m afraid this time it really (almost certainly) is the end of the tadpoles. Sometimes there’s even a chin or a neck, and usually also a mess of big floppy ears and crazy hair, with here and there a beard thrown in.

I videotaped her drawing the second drawing above. It got really messy as she forgot which was the head and which the body so it ended up looking like an alien! I’ll try to get it on YouTube soon so you can get an idea of her drawing: very spontaneous, with big gestures and with running commentary. It’s so funny and clever.

She is also keen on signing her name now that she can write the letters without our physical help (some verbal cues are still appreciated). In the first drawing below she ran out of space for the letter I and E so she added them in front of the A and M. And sometimes she rotates the page to get at the empty space to sign her name. So, no, she didn’t draw the human figure on the last drawing upside down (I love, though, the way the ears attach to the hairdo!)

To witness the development of Amie’s drawing, check this out or click here.

What with all the house and land hunting, premature planning of gardens and scrambling to find a new preschool - after all the hassle we went through finding one here in Brookline! - I may be blogging less, but that doesn’t mean we’re playing less around here!

And even though I haven’t posted her drawings lately, Amie is still producing on average more over three “pictures” a day.

Here are some she made yesterday:

I drew the large tree outline, which she colored with green and brown. Then she added her own tree: the blue one, on top. A trunk, a crown! She did this spontaneously, after observing the tree I drew - and the one her Baba drew for her to color yesterday.

First, “little guy”. The ears are now the prominent features, but for the rest, these tadpoles have become quite formulaic and she is getting rather bored with them.

I suggested that she might want to draw the head higher up, next time, so there is more room for the body. She immediately took that advice to heart and drew Maisy and Cyril (”Cyril starts with ssssss” and so it does!):

I don’t think it matters to her (yet) whether she has enough room for the legs. What seems to matter more is that she makes use of the entire space underneath (though all that space on top in the previous draiwng didn’t bother her a bit). She does like to draw those “long legs, Mama! Those are looong!”

And again, note the big ears. I don’t quite remember anymore how Cyril (to the left) works: I think the blue oval-ish shape is his head/body and the black oval and circle are his ears…

Then, the drawing that amazed me most! This is Bambi:

When she wanted to draw the spots on Bambi’s back, she had to ask, though: “Where is Bambi’s back?” How strangely they sort out their shapes and body parts and directions. wish I could see through her eyes (and brain)!

(About her signature: she wrote the A and the i by herself. I guided her hand for the M and described the E verbally as she drew it. )

(If you want to follow the development of Amie’s drawing, check this out or click here.)

We had a wonderful Sunday filled with family fun. A visit to the Science Museum (DH and I have lived in Boston for almost 10 and this was our first visit!), shopping together (wonderful to see Amie interact with strangers in the store), building and flying paper airplanes (from this wonderful book), reading books and playing with animals.

At the end of the long and tiring day, Amie sat down on the floor and spontaneously took some quiet time. She opened her arts and crafts box and cut pieces of paper (with her ziggy-zaggy safety scissors), colored them, and glued them to a page.

I had nothing to do with it! It was one of those rare and harmonious moments when everyone was doing something exclusively by him/herself.

Part of our shopping today involved a certain do-it-yourself-hardware store, where I found a couple of simple binding posts with screws, like so (couldn’t even find a picture of it on Google Images!):

… So that I could finally assemble our “Bambi,” which we cut out of recycled cardboard and painted a while back.

It’s a pull toy! It just took me a while to get sturdy enough fasteners, and these binding posts are very cheap, strong and reusable!

I think we’ll make more of these, if Amie likes it - she certainly did look forward to this one. I’ll have to get the hang of coordinating and weighting the limbs and whatnot needs to get moved by one pull, because this baby Bambi moves even clumsier than the newborn one in the movie!

More about having actually watched Bambi later…

Amie drew “The People” today. 4 of them. 1 big person and 3 tiny ones:

She also signed her name on the back:

We’ve been working on letters, and this is her first full written word (besides “8oo”, i.e., “Boo”). The A she has down pat. The M still tends to flatten out and go on at length. For the i and the e she needs a reminder in the form of a verbal description: “a line up with a dot on top”, “a line up and three short lines across”.

She has been very keyed up lately. Very repetitive, anxiously so sometimes, swallowing sounds and whole words in order to get it out as fast as possible: a song sung for the tenth time, a statement made the fifth time around. She talks and sings nonstop. She can’t fall asleep because her mind is racing. Her head hurts when you comb her hair. “Growth spurt,” we call it.

She has also been very imaginative, making up songs and stories, some cute (”Yesterday there was a dinosaur here and we played well together”) and some quite outrageous (”Mama pooped on the floor yesterday and I had to clean it up!” - so not true!).

Toddler life. Nonstop. Breathtaking.

This just in:

Rock-n-Romp, a kid-friendly rock show series, is coming to Boston. R-n-R founder Debbie Lee is coming up from D.C for the Boston kick off and she is bringing Neal Pollack, the author of Alternadad with her.

They will perform with Boston Music Award nominees the Bon Savants and the psychedelic rockers Wonderful Spells, who promise to play for you, live, the kind of music you listened to BEFORE YOU HAD KIDS. This while also keeping your kids engaged: they can watch the band, experiment with instruments, dance or just run around and hang out in a safe and friendly environment.

And Neal Pollack is going to read from his all-too-close-to-home book Alternadad. There will be more literariness from author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka, who won Child’s Magazine “Best Books of the Year” in ‘05 for his book Punk Farm.

WHEN: Sunday, February 24, 2008 from 3pm-6pmWHERE: Great Scott, 1222 Commonwealth Avenue, Allston, MA 02134

TICKETS: $8.00* in advance or $10* at the door. *Each ticket admits one adult and one child. NEAT: An adult must accompany child and a child must accompany an adult. Get tickets via Rock-n-Romp Boston or Ticket Web.

See you there, perhaps?

Over the weekend Amie was presented with a wonderful gift from friends: their daughter’s old doll house. A real, wooden, doesn’t-fall-over-when-you-bump-it doll house! Complete with people and pets and furniture and even a garden for planting.

Amie and eight-year-old S who gave it to her (I plan to return it once Amie too has grown out of it) were setting it up together. Amie of course had a different idea of where things should go. For instance, there are six dolls, but only two beds, so why shouldn’t one sleep in the bath tub? (The old homemade doll house will be the guest quarters). Soon they found a balance and played together for hours.

But after S had gone, Amie changed one thing so that it fits the universe as she knows it: