Very 1st Painting Lessons

I’m often impatient waiting for my kids to reach an appropriate stage to do x, y or z. It’s not that I want them to grow up faster, logically I know better. It’s just that I can’t wait to share more of my life with them and to expose them to all the possibilities the world has to offer. So I often go through daily internal struggles over the silliest of things. I feel this way with art, especially painting. I know Eleanor’s not ready to paint, but I am. So here’s my plan: break it down and expose her to one tiny element at a time. So far we’ve played with a variety of papers, touching them, crinkling them, tearing them. I’ve also let her play with dry paint brushes to her hearts content. I make available a variety of sizes to feel, carry and rearrange. At 13 months I now felt she was ready for the next step. Perfect for a warm day, we broke out the paint brushes, “no spill” paint cups and ……. WATER.

The paint brush immediately went into her mouth and then she painted her legs and the sidewalk until the water was nearly gone and the 21 month old neighbor boy decide he needed a turn. I remember Seth “painting” everything in sight when he was about 2. He loved to mimic Paddington in one of his books and paint the chairs with water. Even older kids enjoy painting pictures on the sidewalk, knowing it will soon dry and disappear.

Before the end of the summer I plan on stripping her down and letting her have a go at finger painting. But for now, I’m satisfied.

Sun Prints

Being at my parents always brings back memories. To top it off, they have a gigantic house filled with remnants of our past. They’re trying to pair down all the stuff in preparation for retirement and the simpler life. I’ve gotta tell you though, I almost don’t want them to. I’m proud of their efforts to reduce the material side of their life but I’ve also always been proud of how they never waste anything. All scraps and miscellany have always been kept for future projects. As we’ve always been a very prolific family when it comes to creative projects that means an unbelievable amount of miscellany. When I got the wild hair to do leaf rubbings, not only did they have the perfect materials, we ran across plenty of other inspirational items. One such was a package of Sunprint paper. Seeing as they use to sell these kits in their store which closed in 1981, this little kit was more than 25 years old. Would it still work? You betcha!

Although the kits are meant for ages 6 and up I thought we could give it a try. I’m guessing there are two reasons for this age bracket - danger of ingestion of the chemical paper and the patience needed to complete the project. Regardless it worked fine for us. As this was a spur of the moment project I, of course, didn’t read the directions very carefully and pretty much went from childhood memory. Luckily it all worked out OK in this area as well. For those of you that haven’t seen sunprints, it’s simply a chemical reaction to the sunlight hitting the special paper. We only made a couple due to that patience requirement I was talking about. That, and the fact that I didn’t want to go all gun ho only to find out the paper was too old.

The first step, in the shade I might add, was placing the paper on a board and something opaque on the paper. We then laid a small sheet of glass over the top to hold it steady. The kits actually come with plexiglass but our sheet must have been lost in the last 25+ years, so I used a small sheet of regular glass from a picture frame instead.

We left the paper for a few minutes until it turned white and then ran it under water to stop the development. I would recommend having a pot of water on hand to place the images in that you can then place a lid on to block out the sunlight. This would probably make for a more crisp print. After a few minutes under water we laid the images out to dry. As the papers dried inside I was a little worried as the whole sheet was turning blue. I guessed that the paper must have just been too old. Not the case! In fact the areas turned white by the sun then turned blue and the areas that were blue under the opaque items turned white. Obviously I had forgotten this part. We left the papers to dry on the counter and then flattened them under a heavy book and ended up with these:

Simple but still fun. This is not the best photo, still if I had read the directions and planned a little better the images would have been much more crisp. Now that I know the paper is still good, we’ll certainly be trying these again during our next visit. Maybe next time we can use some kitchen gadgets or get into my mom’s button collection to find our opaque items. I can certainly see Seth getting more into these as he gets older. It’s a nice little science experiment to boot. Check out the Sunprints gallery of images and tips page for more info.

A Stones Throw

Thank you, everyone, for your kind thoughts. I can’t begin to say how much I have appreciated it.

OK, time to start getting back to the real world. It’s going to take us a while to get back on track but I’ve got to start somewhere. Seth’s had a lot of time in front of the TV this week. Hubby has been out of town the last couple days and I’ve been trying to keep my little family from interfering with the full families mourning and of course, dealing with my own. I haven’t been completely successful with this venture, but I’ve been trying. We’ll be driving back home this week and I needed to get us on the path to recovery. Today we made a stab at some normalcy for an hour or so. I really enjoyed the escape. A couple of art projects (which I’ll post later) and some pebble tossing filled our time while Eleanor slept an unbelievable 3 hours.

As it turns out simply throwing stones is an excellent way to learn about all sorts of things:

• Is the stone big or little?
• Does it make a big or little ripple?
• Why does it make a ripple?
• Does it make a big kerplunk or a little one?
• Why? to all of the above

Give it a try sometime. You’ll be amazed. It was very cathartic.

Volcanoes!

Seth is beyond enamored with volcanoes. It all started with an Usborne book which came in a pack of books from a Scholastic book order. I ordered the pack because I’ve been searching for good books for preschoolers on skeletons and body parts, another of his interests. I thought one of the books in the pack might fit this bill nicely. However, once I received the set I realized it is intended a slightly older age bracket. Unfortunately, Scholastic book orders are, of course, delivered to the child at school so I was unable to review the book prior to Seth getting his hands on it. Otherwise I believe I would have removed the volcano book straight away due to a couple pages on Pompeii. Specifically, the photo of a plaster cast of a man who had perished by choking to death on ash. Lesson learned. I found myself particularly at a loss when Seth questioned me on this page and so I fell back on the actual text. I believe he was first drawn in by the sketch of a skeleton buried in ash and he made me read this page over and over with thousands of questions along the way. During the last couple weeks he has been engaged in acting out volcanoes erupting AND choking to death on ash. Completing the scenario is a scientist who fills the body with plaster and it comes back to life. Obviously the concept of death isn’t quite complete in my 3 year old’s mind. In an effort to refocus this creativity I suggested we make our very own volcano in the kitchen. Here I give you our version of Mt. Vesuvius, complete with instructions:

1. Let one inquisitive child pour baking soda in a cup set on a plate in the kitchen or out of doors. By no means should you measure, but if you need a rough idea a couple tablespoon should more than do it.

2. As the adult in control, pour vinegar into said cup. What! You didn’t pour enough? Just pour some more on top. Maybe 1/2 cup in the end? It depends on the size of your glass.

3. Watch with awe.

Next time maybe we’ll add food coloring for realism and dish soap to slow it down a bit. I’m going to hold off on the paper mache volcanic mountain for a bit though.

In the end, I’m glad we got the books. It’s been quite an experience. As for my original quest, does anyone out there have any suggestions for preschool appropriate books on body parts or skeletons? Preferably no death scenes.

Imaginative Sidewalk Chalk

We had a great weekend. I say this mostly because I feel we got a lot accomplished AND I still had fun with the kids. Maybe this was as a result of the warmer temps. We got a bit of spring cleaning in. OK, a lot of spring cleaning. This is amazing for us as we’re not known as tidy or clean people. I also got my hair cut, and I do mean cut. We’re talking instead of halfway down my back, it’s above my shoulders. Even though Seth knew I was getting it cut and came running when he heard my voice at the door he turned tail as soon as he saw me. Pouting with his head down he quickly went back to the kitchen where he told his papa that he was sad because I got too much of my hair cut off. I’ve had long hair since he was born, I guess I should have warned him better. As for Eleanor, she still smiled up at me but when I tried to touch her she would start to scream and move away. It took them a couple hours to warm back up to me. Looking back at this and considering I had to work at the office part of Saturday it’s hard to believe in the end I think it was a good weekend. Maybe it’s just that it started on a good note and ended on a good note, interspersed with some great fun. Kathryn came over Friday evening to watch Emma and work on some projects. Today Seth had a play date, I got to hold a 7 week old and Seth and I spent a lot of quality time together. Mostly we talked, researched and acted out scenes about volcanoes, his new obsession.

Another way we enjoyed ourselves this weekend was with sidewalk chalk. Steve drew (because he’s better than me at it) a rocket ship, a fire truck and a submarine on the front walk with chalk. Each vehicle had one or two seats with a steering wheel and/or control buttons. Incidentally, when we have our annual block party and the street is closed we go even further creating a large house with rooms and furniture in the middle of the road. Once these creations were completed to Seth’s specifications his imagination took over, directing us in how to act in each of these vehicles. There are very specific ways you know.

Greetings from Duluth

Well, here we are in Duluth visiting my sis. We’re all about the out of doors this weekend. Saturday we went cross country skiing. It was Seth’s first time and he loved it. We learned that kids generally ski better without poles as it takes too much coordination. We also quickly learned that Seth’s favorite part was falling over. After just a couple tumbles we noticed him purposefully falling over, smiling all the time. I was torn between wanting him to learn how to ski and wanting him to thoroughly enjoy his first experience. Fun won out as I don’t want to scare him away with my ambitions. I think we’ll be looking for some used skis for him next winter. I had no idea he’d take to it so well.

On Sunday Steve and Ellie went snowboarding. A first for Steve. I stayed back with the kids on the condition that no whining about sore muscles afterwards would be allowed. So far so good. They had a blast.

This morning we’re planning on doing some snowshoeing or maybe more cross-country skiing. The snow is there for a reason. Get out and enjoy it.

Thanks Ellie!