And…
Aidan is quite an innovative little guy. When he sat down to draw yet another garden plot the other day, I noticed that he had an extra sheet of paper on hand. I watched him draw the brown garden soil on one sheet, then draw soil on the other. Then he picked up the green crayon and started drawing all sorts of interesting shapes on one of the plots. I asked if he was drawing two gardens at once, and he replied, “No. I’m drawing the weeds on this paper so they won’t get in my garden.”
I’m not sure how that would extrapolate to real life gardening, but there you go.
Aidan and Liam are having a tea party with their ghost friend, Fireball. Chloe was not invited.
We barely made it home, and when we did, we lifted the hood of the car to see power steering fluid oozing out all over the place. It’s a good thing I had so many skilled mechanics on hand.
Story to follow…
What is it about books and baby powder? They go together like milk and…bologna? Well, that does nothing to hamper Liam’s dedicated association of the two. When he sees a bottle of baby powder, he immediately thinks, “books!” (All this reading I’m doing for school on cognitive processes and word associations has me wondering about the long term effects of this.) You may be wondering how one develops such an odd association. It all started one day when, playing amidst the ruins of one of his famed book towers, he happened upon an open bottle of baby powder. And he discovered that, if you turn the bottle upside down over one of the books, pretty white shapes appear on the cover of the book.
A few days later, he found the powder again and, noticing that there were no books scattered on the floor waiting to be sprinkled, sought one out from the shelf. He placed it on the floor and was pleased to see the fine, white dust float down onto the book’s canvas. I, on the other hand, was alarmed to see the beginnings of another indoor blizzard, so I quickly stepped in and closed the top of the bottle. Liam took little notice and moved on to the next book.
I could see the bafflement spread across his face as he shook the bottle over the book and realized that the dark blue cover of the book remained…well, dark blue. Becoming angry at the book for being so obstinately blue, he flung it to the side and pulled another off of the shelf. Again, to his dismay, the book’s cover remained unchanged beneath the upturned powder bottle. He tried a couple more books before falling into a mad frenzy, wherein he ran across the room, threw himself against the wall and stood sobbing, occasionally throwing his head back in a piteous wail. His antipathy toward the books was evident in the frequent glares with which he greeted them for the rest of the fifteen or so minutes he was in the living room. Never has a child’s faced expressed such an agonizing sense of betrayal. Finally, led by some distraction or another, he made his way into the playroom and lived a more or less peaceful existence for the remainder of the afternoon.
I stayed behind and put the offending books back on the shelf so that they might not awaken any painful memories for the poor boy. And I can only hope that the incident didn’t cause some deep, psychological trauma that will manifest one day when he finds some old, dust-covered volume of Shakespeare.
(Et tu, Brute?)
I was trying to entertain the little ones in the car this morning, so I pulled out my old take on The Lady of Shalott which I fondly call the “Ice Cream and Pie” version. I thought Aidan would appreciate the many references to sugar and sweets. Here is what followed…
April: On either side the coffee lie / Deep bowls of ice cream and of pie / That fill the spoons and meet the tines; / And through the air the scent drifts by / Of black leaf tea with bergamot…
Aidan: Stop. I don’t like that.
April: No? How about this version? On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye / That clothe the wold and meet the sky; / And through the field the road runs by / To many-towered Camelot…
Aidan: I don’t like that one either… Can you tell me another one?
April: Okay… Music, when soft voices die, / Vibrates in the memory; / Odours, when sweet violets sicken, / Live within the sense they quicken. / Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, / Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed; / And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, / Love itself shall slumber on.
[pause]
April: Or how about this? Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Aidan: I like those two. I want to hear more.
I was as proud as other parents must be when their sons catch their first baseball. ‘At a boy, Aidan!
Liam’s recent fascination: balls. And this is clearly reflected in his art (I’m not imagining this…he actually points and exclaims, “Baws!” regularly while he’s working the paint and the crayons). Everything even remotely round is deemed to be a ball. As Aidan likes to point out, “When Liam sees a circle, he thinks it’s a ball. That silly baby.” :)
Watercolor:
Crayon:
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