Project is fun for grandkids

I flunked art last week when we visited the grandkids. Grandson Jacob asked me to make a ball from the Play-Doh he handed me. I made what I thought was a ball and offered it to him. He examined it and said, “That’s not a ball! That’s an apple. Make a ball!”
I rolled the yellow glob in my palms and once again I succeeded in making an apple, not a ball. I was more than ready to admit defeat but Jacob decided to give me another chance. This time was the order was to make something simpler — like a seahorse.
I shaped the stuff into an approximation of a seahorse and got lucky. It was pronounced acceptable and he played with it for a while before smooshing it into an amoeba and handing it to my husband with the command to “Make a shark.”
My husband is a better sculptor than I am, and his first effort was enough like a shark for Jacob to terrorize the invisible seas for a few minutes before the shark morphed into a blob. His next demand was that my husband make a hammerhead shark. By the end of the day my husband was an expert and could whip out a hammerhead shark in a matter of minutes.
I never did manage to make a ball, but my abstract seahorses swam the nonexistent ocean quite happily.
After big sister Emma got home from first grade, we started another art project. The idea was for the kids to paint little flowerpots and wooden balls then glue them together, add some felt hats and capes and make witches. Sounds simple, right?
Wrong again. They painted the parts then they painted their hands. I think Jacob even had some on his belly and feet. After cleaning the purple and green paint off the children and the front door I decided that was enough for the day.
When baby Nicholas got up from his nap he discovered that the balls fit quite nicely into the flowerpots. Two days later Emma wanted to finish her witches. It took almost an hour to get the balls pried out of the flowerpots after we found them in the yard under the picnic table. We never did find the last ball. Jacob decided he only wanted to make one, not two creations so that worked out.
Then Jacob didn’t want yarn hair on his. He also didn’t want clothes on it, nor did he want to make a witch. He wanted to make a princess. Emma glued witch hats together, using almost a tablespoon of adhesive per hat. Jacob glued the head on his princess, using almost as much glue as his sister did.
I cut out the capes and helped them wrap the felt around their witches and the princess. Emma used up most of the remaining glue attaching the yarn hair. She found a glue stick and some glitter glue to use on the rest of the pieces.
We left our creations to dry once more. The children went on to play something else while I cleaned up the mess.
None of our projects will win any prizes but that wasn’t the point. The point was that we were all having fun together. We painted and glued. We cut and shaped. We helped each other and made a grand mess in the process.
As any child can tell you, if it involves making a mess, then it must be fun. I found out that they don’t really care if I can make a ball out of Play-Doh or if their witches look like any witch anyone has ever seen. What is important is that we do things together. It is also important that we use washable paint and lots and lots of glue.[[In-content Ad]]