Impressions From the Day

(We painted like Seurat. Get it? :) )

So our next foray into not allowing the boy’s brains to become mush this summer involved painting. I’m an art teacher, so this was perfect for me. Turns out, Harrison enjoys painting too. We followed a lesson idea from TeachKidsArt, a blog that, obviously enough, has lessons with which to teach kids art. Since I’m a high school teacher and have little-to-no-knowledge about showing young kids how to do art, it’s proven to be quite useful already this summer.

So at first Harrison didn’t want any part of the painting—he was more interested in using markers than watercolors. I was cool with that, though, so he drew Nemo and I drew and then painted some random fish. Mine was not terribly original, but it was more a study for me than anything else—I think I might get my kids to do something along these lines next year, only painting their faces or something else that is there with them. After he finished Nemo, Harrison decided to draw Voltron and Optimus Prime and some other such stuff. He eventually played with the Q-tips and paint, but not in any kind of pointillistic way. It’s still cool, though. At least he wasn’t watching TV.

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While singing, my son often makes up lyrics. He’ll also replace existing lyrics with non-sense gibberish or sometimes just mix the words around on purpose. Today, while singing “The Farmer in the Dell,” Harrison’s new lyric was, “The farmer takes the ho, the farmer takes the ho, hi ho the derry-o, the farmer takes the ho.” It took every bit of my self control to not fall down laughing.

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Tonight was the first night of swim lessons. I think, down deep inside, every parent out there was hoping their kid was the next Michael Phelps. Aside from the obvious drug problem, I think that would be pretty cool. :)