We’re into art and craft these days, inspired by my ever-inspiring boss at a women’s conference where working women were talking about the issues we face and she highlighted that things probably won’t be any better if we quit our jobs because its not like we will say “okay! lets do some art and craft!” Rather we will just go about doing housework, planning this or that etc given our highly charged personalities. Which was a wakeup call that I SHOULD do some craft with Sophia. And given that my creative juices are rather limited, I ordered a lollibox. It is, admittedly a bit expensive but it does save me the trouble of having to go out and get different materials and provides the ideas so I don’t have a rack my brains.
The lollibox arrives!
We started with the stained glass window which was the less messy activity but I was worried that she would snatch the scissors and do dangerous things with it. Surprisingly she didn’t but just held out the pieces of crepe paper for me to cut and repeated the names of shapes after me. It was clear that she already knew the name of some shapes like “triangular”, which she readily called out without me having to say anything, but not others like “oval” because when I showed it to her and said “oval”, she rolled it around on the floor and said “roll over”, confusing “oval” and “over”. How cute.
Hanging up her masterpiece – on the knob of the DVD player!
Then there was the colours factory activity, which I was even more apprehensive about and only dared to do just before her bath time, covering the floor with lots of newspaper and protecting her with an apron. In my mind, she would insist on making random strokes with all the colours, resulting in an indiscernible mess, but surprisingly, she followed all my instructions on where to put the colors, except towards the end, where she insisted on using white. No trouble, we just ended up with a pastel version of the colour we were supposed to use anyway. Funny things also happened along the way for this activity, such as when I said “wow, so many colors!”, referring to the little pots of colors and she said “wow, so many colors, green blue, green, green, green!” (calling every colour which name she has forgotten green). I think at the end of the exercise she remembers blue and purple, on top of green and red which she is very familiar with. Yay! Success!
I know my colours – yes, the “rainbows” are not quite painted properly but it better Sophia does it than I grab her hand.
Mothering the S sisters 