They had to do a diorama about the desert after reading a story about walking in the desert in class.
You remember the days of "little world in a shoebox," right?
Well, hers reflects the desert that she's gotten to see: the one out in Arizona where Grandpa Smith, Uncle Scott and Aunt Amy, and all her cousins live.
We spent a day and a half scrounging up little plastic animals and plants and stuff from her toy box and picking up a few more at a local craft shop that she wanted (see, e.g., big howling coyote, which was "soooooo, perfect, pleeeeeeeeease"...mom is clearly a softie because I plunked down $1.50 for a teeny plastic howling coyote.)
She started by painting the inside of the shoebox so she had sky and sand parts. Then it wasn't blue enough, so she did a second coat of sky blue.
We had a round sponge dauber that I have used for stenciling that she used to dab on clouds here, there and everywhere. I thought they ended up looking pretty good.
But I'm most grateful that I thought to put down a thick layer of newspaper on the craft table before we started. Did I mention she's seven and really enthusiastic about splashing paint around in a Jackson Pollack style masterpiece?
Then she glued down a big piece of sandpaper to the bottom "because it wouldn't be the desert without sand, duh" and took some time to place piles of rocks stuck together with globs of glue all over the place. The Arizona desert is pretty rocky, and she wasn't satisfied with a plain sheet of sandpaper. No siree.
Then came the palm tree, cactus, and animal-o-rama placement.
When you are seven? It isn't about visual aesthetic so much as "how many things can I cram in this box?"
She had a blast, but I had to step in and help with the glue at the point where she'd gotten her fingers almost stuck together with excess.
The funniest thing was her insistence about putting a little plastic hiker dude with binoculars in the back of the box. She said, "That's Grandpa Smith hiking in the desert, mom. He has to be in there."
She wanted to put the Grandpa Smith plastic guy right beside the giant, creepy scorpion "so they could have a good fight" but I persuaded her that if Grandpa Smith met a giant scorpion in the desert, he probably wouldn't just walk right up to it to say howdy.
The picture is not the greatest -- I took it yesterday evening after a long day of helping move furniture over to the school, and had just enough patience for a quick snapshot with the iMAC photobooth software before I crawled up to bed. But I thought it would be a hoot to share.
There's always a fine line between being helpful for your kids when they have a project like this, and helping so much that it becomes more your project than theirs. I try to stay on the "her project, not mine" side of the line as much as I can, sometimes to the point of irritating her for not helping more. I think there is value in learning to do things for yourself and in figuring out little problems on your own where you can.
But I still struggle with it.
I have a feeling that this is a thing that all parents have to balance out for themselves across the whole of their child's lifetime -- how could you not, really, when you love someone this much and want the best for them? But that doesn't make it any easier.
Especially when I'm also fighting my perfectionist tendencies and trying very hard not to pass them on to her by insisting on things like labels for all the animals or touching up the lines between sky and sand. It's my own issue, not hers, and she worked really hard on this project and made it look fantastic and that is plenty of awesomeness for a 7 year old who doesn't have her mother's insane drive to get the best grade EVAR on anything she ever touches.
I wouldn't wish that on her for anything. It's been an exhausting lifetime of pushing myself in that way -- one of these days, I'd like to master letting go and allowing myself to do just enough instead of having to do more than anyone else. It would be a much happier row to hoe, wouldn't it?
3 comments:
ska-weel that is so cute and imaginative.
when my girls were in the 4th grade, they had to do the one of the california missions made outta sugar cube thing. i don't remember those days fondly.
the peanut did really good -- as did you mom.
that's a pretty darn sophisticated diorama for 7 years old.
good job, Peanut!
She loves all things art -- she was so excited to paint, and I was not allowed to help in any way until she got to the clouds. We figured out how to do one of them together and then I was banished again. She has a really nice eye for this sort of thing. We try to nurture that where we can, because she really enjoys art a lot.
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