First day of school!

He said it was "fantastic"!

A Boy and His Journal

We're doing loose sheets here, but they'll be made into journals eventually! We are using stonehenge printmaking paper and watercolors - Artist's Loft and Winsor & Newton.

A little boy's painting

He started with blue. He ALWAYS starts with blue! 

And here is the finished product - SpongeBob, Squidward, and Patrick, his favorite pals!

Best Picture Ever

This is my son, hot tubbing in my mom's hotel room - not in the bathroom, this sucker was right in the bedroom - while he watches Lightning McQueen on a big flat panel TV. THe picture is horrible, but I nearly peed when my mom sent it to me!! Look at his happy little face while he floats and sings!

Paint Your Own

Rubber ducky! That's right, Mini Me wanted a rubber ducky from the Easter bunny. So I got him a regular one, one wearing bunny ears, and this one - that he got to paint himself! I know, I know, but he's an only child, and that should have SOME benefits, right? So I buy too many Easter things and he doesn't get a sister.

There is his ducky, all painted and ready for the tub!

Krusty Krab

Built it with my own two hands!

One of the headlights is missing...

The cheekster and I had a lot of fun playing with these!! 

PS Four months today is my birthday - start saving your pennies! I like video games and paper. :) 

Watercolor Tree

First, tape on a canvas board:

Next, a five-year-old and watercolors:

Where's Waldo??

Just kidding, I have no idea where Waldo is! Ignore the mess and focus on the two journals - mine on the left and Liam's on the right. See the freshly painted rainbow? They're his new thing to paint. Usually he just slops paint on top of paint until there's a big mess and he gets all mad and says "It looks like garbage, I'm throwing it away!" (Don't worry, I don't let him do that!) Anyway, I got up from the table and was coming back to sit and thought it was fun to see them both there open, drying together. I love that crazy kid!

Mommy, can we paint a rainbow?

Liam Sprays

We did this page together, we put some stuff in the way and sprayed over them...

These are ones he did alone:

I think it's so cute how he sprays so close to the bottom of the page. We had to make a deal that he only sprays them three times each because otherwise he just saturates the entire page and makes a huge muddy mess. He LOVES them, though, so mommy did a good job!

That's my boy!

A crayon in each hand. I LOVE it!

Birthday Boy...

Five years ago:

Today:

You'd better watch out...

Santa Claus likes chocolate milk best, did you know that? I didn't. Mini Me told me. My mommy read us The Night Before Christmas and now I'm watching South Park Christmas episodes. What could be better?

Cartoon!

I'm hoping to cartoon yesterday, today. You know what I mean? So here's yesterday's page! I gotta ink it, color it, etc, but it's a good start and it makes me happy!!

Mini me :)

I'm kind of excited about making today's page because I got to hang out with Kelly! We tried on horrible dresses, got buzzed on margaritas at lunch, and laughed like idots - that's the best part!

This makes me sad

My son is a beautiful child with an amazing smile. BUT when I'm taking his picture, I NEVER make him freeze and smile because the result is something like this:

I wish the photographers would just let him look natural. I LOVE how expressive his face is and would much rather see him with some kind of natural expression on his face instead of this. I'm especially partial to this one:

"Mommy, look at my rainbow!"

The New Me

"Mommy, this is the new you!"

No, that's not a necklace, it's my bellybutton :)

Smooch!

Coloring "in the lines"

Some of you already know this because I've talked about it before - Mini Me has his own journal. He's four, and has had his own journal since he was almost two. Here's why: he doesn't like coloring books. He would flip and flip and flip and not find a page he wanted to color and I didn't understand what the problem was - didn't little kids like to color? So I got him some paints - and he LOVED painting. But what do you DO with all those loose pieces of paper they paint on? No way I'm throwing them out (even though I am the kind of person who throws away cards) but what the F am I supposed to do with them? So I thought a BOOK would be a good way to keep them all together and not all over the house.

 (Yes, that is my coffee table, and yes, it does have a lot of paint on it. Don't care!)

And this is how I discovered the problem - he likes to paint, sure. But he also LOVES to "draw". I got him those fat markers that smell like fruits and he likes to take every color and scribble on the same page and say that he's making a "utopian city". That's his favorite. But he'll also draw race cars, rocket ships, squares, circles, and he taught HIMSELF how to write his name. So the coloring book "problem" was that he doesn't like LINES. He doesn't want that restriction on his art! 

He wants the freedom of creating what he wants. Whatever is in that little head comes spilling out into his journal, EXACTLY like adults want to do and struggle with! If I give him one of those watercolor paint things you can get for a dollar he will use every single color right down to the plastic and make a big, soupy, brown puddle then stand back and declare "I'm a really good artist!"

Believe it or not, there is a point to this story. The other day we were at Old Chicago having dinner (hubby is a manager there) and he wanted my mom to color in the menu with him. "Pinkie, will you please color crazy with me?" He asked, and started scribbling. She replied "I can't. My mommy taught me to color inside the lines." For those of you not fluent in Passive-Aggression, this suggests that his mommy hasn't taught him that and should. I "should" restrict his freedom with his crayons. I "should" make him use the "correct" color when he's coloring a flower or a tiger, instead of letting him color everything blue. He's overused blue since before he could say the word "blue". He likes blue. He's his favorite color. He'll tell anyone who will listen that he loves ALL the colors in the rainbow but blue is his favorite, especially dark blue. He colored this for me at Story Time. Can four-year-olds color "better" than this? Yes. Liam can. He CAN color in the lines, and he KNOWS what a giraffe looks like. But he wanted it to look like this. I watched the other moms coach their kids through picking the "right" colors while Liam happily made his giraffe blue, and handed it to me with a HUGE smile and said "For you, Mommy!"

Here is what he did in school when his teacher made him color inside the lines. He can also cut along the lines, hold his pencil correctly, recognizes all the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, is obsessed with how to spell words and read, and will often shout out a Spanish word for something that I didn't know.

So maybe I'm the parent who's growing a serial killer or drug addict because I feed him PopTarts and let him color outside the lines and play video games. But right now he wants to go to medical school and learn science to become a doctor. 

PS I didn't call it his journal, just his "book", until one day my husband came home and Liam was scribbling furiously with a colored pencil and Daddy said "What are you doing, Buddy?" and he said "Working in my journal."

Pinkie

My mom (Mini calls her Pinkie) is in town! So far all we've done is eat and check out her hotel, but we have plans for baseball, MOA, Cars 2, and much more! Mini is going to stay at the hotel with her for a couple of nights (if the first night goes well, of course) and it's the first time hubby and I will been alone together in over two years! How crazy is that?

I'm glad she's here, but it's going to seriously curb my arting. It's hard to art while someone is talking to you who actually needs your attention. When I art with Kelly, Ajae, and Suzi on skype, they do their thing and I do mine and we hold up things to show each other, but it's very relaxed and mostly we just hang out. Mom expects to be entertained a little. Not a lot, she doesn't think the world revolves around her or anything, but a little. Enough that it's hard to art with her around.

Now that I'm talking about it, I feel like it's a challenge - I can make myself art while she's here...

This is Mini showing her something on her iPad. Good thing she brought it, so her four-year-old grandson could show her how to use it.