I Write. You Read.

As the piles of small spiral notebooks filled with scribbles scattered around the house will confirm, our little boy loves to draw. Or write. Or whatever he thinks it is. The point is that his favorite activity is to make his mark in colored wax whenever he gets the chance. For all we could tell, it was just random scribbles.

Awhile back Simon made his first recognizable shape, something he and everyone else could look at and agree on its validity as a recognizable object. It was an the letter “O.” Sure, it was a wobbly, not-always-completely-closed “O,” but it was an “O” nonetheless. Awesome.

Over time, the random page-spanning scribbles were refined to smaller, more controlled spots of color. He was steadily gaining proficiency with his medium of choice, and it was only a matter of time before his visions found release on the canvas. In the meantime, he would badger everyone to draw house after house for him, all of which had to conform to his ideal composition based on Blue’s house. Research, I guess.

Earlier this year we bought our budding Rembrandt a set of bathtub crayons, since he enjoys coloring so much and it would give hims eomthing to do in the tub besides splashing. His early works were the usual scribbles, punctuated by the ubiquitous “O” and an occasional “house” that held questionable validity for anyone but Simon.

One night, as I was giving Phoebe her bath and Angie bathed the boy, she informed me that Simon had drawn a face. Like, with eyes and ears and hair and a mouth. Entirely unprompted and without instruction, he had begun drawing faces all over the bathtub. And they looked like faces, too. Super awesome.

I suppose I’ve drawn faces for Simon in the past, just as I’ve drawn countless kitty cats, bananas and especially houses (please, someone save me from the houses), but it’s been awhile and it amazes me that he has learned this deceptively simple skill almost completely on his own. If nothing else this reinforces my utter lack of book-learning when it comes to child development and psychology. How normal is it for a two-year-old to draw faces, even rudimentary ones? Should he be drawing the bodies, too, complete with fingers and toes? I don’t worry about it, but there is definitely a hole in my knowledge base. If anyone can point me to some resources to find out this sort of thing, let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the art show.