It's very freeing to color with a toddler. So freeing, in fact, that I'm writing a second post today!
Actually, I'm writing a second post because I have other things done. Strange feeling. But I digress.
When Eme got her first taste for coloring (a few months ago with a ballpoint pen and some important papers, and then her leg) I got out the crayons and started coloring (in the Hello Kitty coloring book she got from the Lewis family) with her every day.
At first she was very timid with the colors, and I found myself taking time coloring the picture on the facing page, very careful to stay in the lines and make sure the colors matched. I was coloring like an adult. In fact, like an adult who has been pushed into particular boundaries and is stuck there.
Months later, Eme has learned to take a firmer hand with color and her colors appear all over the page, and on the facing page, and on the cardboard box we've set up for her to color on (to keep from getting crayon on her table). Until about a week ago I was still trying to color like an adult. Luckily, Eme saved me.
Eme likes to hand me a crayon and say "hep!" (that is "help" for anyone who needed a translation). I'll say "what should I color?" Eme will then point to a spot on the page (usually the Kiiii or the nossss -- that's the kitty or Kitty's nose) and I'll color it.
At first I was timid, still trying to stay in the lines. Now, though, under Eme's careful tutelage I have learned to scribble like a maniac. I've also kept my adult sense of humor throughout -- ask me about Mr. Mewhansson.
Sometimes I ask "what color should I make the Kitty?" and Eme will respond with "buuuu." (The only two colors she knows are blue and pink, and she gravitates towards blue.) Or I'll ask "what color should I make the teacher's desk?" and she'll hand me a lime green. The number of blue, orange, purple, yellow, and rainbow-hued Hello Kitties (not to mention Hello Kitty's friends and items around Hello Kitty's house and neighborhood) is astounding when taken all together.
Trying to color in the lines and pick "realistic" colors for things may have been very adult of me (and what am I trying to do if not teach Eme how to eventually be an adult), but it didn't exercise my creative side at all.
Coloring stridently (lines? what lines?) and with no regard to whether that color ever appears that way in nature is
much more fun. I feel like I'm better at it than I could ever be when I was trying so hard to make the pictures "right."
And it makes Eme laugh.
And it makes me feel free.
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