Mood Enhancer

I used to color with crayons all the time. In college, David and I exchanged letters and pictures we drew with crayons (back when people exchanged most of their correspondence via paper and stamps and such...), and David even wrote me a poem that compared me to a box of crayons. (The big kind, with lots of colors...it was cute. He wrote it in crayon on the back of a packet of poetry from a class of his...)
I played around a lot with crayons and watercolor paints--decorating most of my apartments with my own cheaply procured artwork...crayons on freezer paper and such.

I can still remember the first time Jabber drew with crayons; I was kind of crazily thrilled by it, to be honest. I remember watching him stand there with a crayon in his fist, standing there barely able to pull himself up on that blue foot locker that served as our coffee table. I remember watching him select a certain color, draw on a certain part of the page, and I thought, "Oh my god, my child just made an artistic choice. He just looked at the page and made a choice and created art."

I know, it's not really all that magical. He picked up a crayon and scribbled with it. But watching him make the connection in his mind between moving his hand and making colors appear on the page...and deciding between different colors and making those choices...it was just an amazing reminder that he was this whole person--an individual with his own will, his own ability to create beauty. It was so cool!

So tonight the Monkey, Jabberwock, and I all spent about an hour coloring. We spend a lot of time drawing, a process which is sort of stressful at times for Jabber, as he is a perfectionist. But coloring in pictures from a coloring book--how can you go wrong?

All of my stress from the day is gone. Crayon therapy.




Here are the space pictures Jabber and I colored, and below are the boys coloring and cutting out their pictures.