Yesterday evening after the Little Monkey had eaten dinner, he was in the Big Monkey’s office playing with the printer. My first thought was that he was trying, in the normally destructive manner of a child his age, to simply take the printer apart and then slather it in snot and drool. In trying to distract him from this as we do like to use the printer now and again, I asked him “Do you want a piece of paper?” To which he sort of agreed. He has not yet learned the word yes, but I took the fact that he became more interested in following me out of the office with the piece of paper than in continuing to take apart the printer as an implied “Yes.”
So the Little Monkey and I sat down at his little table and chairs with the piece of paper and a couple of crayons. He joyfully scribbled and stabbed at the paper with his red crayon and then handed the blue one to me and said “Mummy.” What? You want me to draw? I can’t draw. Pictionary was not one of my stronger party games. Ok, I’ll give it a go. Out came a cat, a bee, a flower, a dinosaur, a butterfly, a tree, and a house. They must have resembled my intended subject as they were all correctly identified by my child. I attempted to draw a dog but Little Monkey said it was a horse so I put a mane on it and went with it.
Later that evening while cleaning up, the Big Monkey was examining my handiwork. A closet artist, he was horrified at the sight of the distorted creatures I had drawn and the prospect of our son a) learning to draw from me and b) learning what animals look like from my drawings. So he picked up a pen and proceeded to instruct me on the fundamentals of how you can start with the same basic elements and create any number of animals. Five minutes later, he had this (minus the caption which I added from my iPhone with Halftone).
It’s a shame I didn’t save my drawings to compare but, without a doubt, Big Monkey is in charge of the coloring from this point forward. Although I do think his cat looks like a beaver.
