Little Artist

You can imagine how much I love the fact that my children enjoy coloring and drawing, and that I do all I can to foster their further enjoyment of it. The two of them spend hours a day working very hard at their creations and I just love to see what they come up with, especially now that Riley is getting very detailed with his drawings. He brought home a coloring page from Cubbies last night, and I noticed he had drawn a picture on the back. I was immediately excited to see he had drawn two figures with heads, bodies, arms, legs, and facial features! (Totally thinking back to my child development classes from college here, haha). I asked him who was in his picture and he proudly said it was himself and daddy. So daddy asked him if they were swinging from ropes because each had one reaallly long arm. He looked at him like, come on daddy what kind of question is that!? and said very enthusiastically with his arm in the air, "no daddy those are our swords!!!" :)

The second picture here is one he drew today (that was originally supposed to be a card for Poppy's birthday tomorrow before Naomi got ahold of it and added her colorful expressions to it - so glad I took a photo of it before that happened!). I sat with him as he drew it, and was so interested to hear him tell the story of his picture as he drew it. I also encouraged him, when he was unsure how to draw something and asked for my help, to look out the window to see what he wanted to draw and then decide on his own how to do it, and he did great! He started with the tree, then did the grass and sky, to which he added a bird and sun, then mommy is in pink and a playground is on the left. The big black thing in the middle was funny...he started drawing it and I asked what it was. He said, "I don't know yet, we'll just have to wait and see." When he finished it up he said, " There! It's a cow!"

I also have to mention that my big boy finally decided today that he is going to use the potty!!! (Hopefully this lasts!) He went the whole morning telling me he had to go and running to the potty and kept his clothes all dry and accomplished that with both #1 and #2! Yay!!! Today may go down in Riley-history as a big day! I told him that all I wanted for my birthday was for him to be a big boy and start using the potty on his own, and it may have worked! After all, 3-year olds take birthdays very seriously. Mommy is very happy. Hehe!