My kids surprise me all the time with the things they do and the things they know. I love it.
I'm far from the only influence in their lives, especially Maia's. She has her friends and their families as well as her classmates and teachers at school, among others. She also has her own growing well of experiences and ideas to draw on. Add in her creative mind to put a spin on an artwork, project, or play idea and she can come up with some pretty amazing things.
Maia has been building up a storm this summer. Building with blocks, building with legos, and building with cards.
I think her card houses are pretty amazing. Daphne does, too.
I didn't realize until she was on her third pyramid of cards that tape was involved.
Apparently she had taped each pair of cards together along one edge.
At first I thought, "Well, that explains how she was able to create such big card houses!" (I remember making card houses as a kid—they didn't usually stay up too well.)
And then I thought, "Wow, that's pretty smart!"
Rather than thinking of the tape as cheating at card houses somehow, I realized that she was being very resourceful and creative in solving the problem of card houses collapsing while she was trying to build the biggest and best structures. (They were still somewhat unstable, by the way, as each pair of cards were only taped in one spot.)
I don't know where she learned about building card houses—not from me, anyway. And I don't know if someone suggested the tape idea or if she came up with it on her own.
Adding the dolls and animal friends was all her idea, though. She turned her house of cards into a dollhouse!
The cards are obviously not your run-of-the-mill deck of playing cards. In case you're curious, they are a set of SARK cards bought when I was depressed and needed her color-soaked art and words of inspiration. They helped me then and are apparently more widely useful than I thought.
You know what I just realized?
It's been a while since I just shared a moment in our lives like this. Somehow I've gotten more and more focused on art activities so that most of what I post is kids' art. I know that's always been my overall focus, but I used to write about other things more, too—our lives, cooking together, children's books we loved, creative play, my own sewing, etc. I miss that. Maybe it's time I brought more of that back into the blog. We still cook together quite a bit, read books all the time, play, live (obviously).
What do you think? Do you prefer the current focus of my blog which seems to be pretty much All Art All the Time. Or would you still be interested in reading if I wrote about some of that other stuff, too? (No hurt feelings either way!)
