Art Day

Red State Capital City Art Museum has a great program for little kids on the first Saturday of every month. It has some cute name, but we just call it art day. It’s always organized around an object or exhibit: there’s a gallery activity, a performance of some sort, and an art project. And these are great art projects, not the usual stick-stuff-on-paper-with-glue pap that passes for art projects most places. When they had an exhibit of vernacular American art, M made an animal-shaped weather vane out of clay; when they focused on a Degas sculpture, M made her own sculpture out of a metal armature, that stuff they used to make casts out of, and gold and silver paint; when they had some mod photo exhibit, M made a light box.

Note who did all those cool projects: M.

In general, we have (purposefully) avoided Second Child Syndrome. There is a full photo album of baby pictures of E, right next to the full photo album of baby pictures of M. Knowing my limits, I avoided baby books altogether, and each girl has a completed “Birth and Naming Book,” a scrapbook that includes, as its title indicates, the first eight days of her life, from arrival through naming ceremony, and then stops. E even received a brand-new play kitchen for her second birthday (we had scavenged a kitchen discarded by the girls across the street for M, but it was already so trashed that we had to keep it in the backyard where it did provide years of fun until it was finally deemed too dilapidated even for us) and a brand-new tricycle for her third (M’s was a hand-me-down that one of the big boys down the street inadvertently destroyed).

But the one place where we have slacked with E is on little kid activities. While we took M to art day just about every month, I think E has been once. When she was a baby, we naturally schlepped her along to M’s big kid activities, and the habit stuck. Luckily, she hasn’t minded: being big is one of her major goals in life. Nevertheless, she does spend a fair amount of time trying to keep up--and usually succeeding. But sometimes it’s nice not to have to try.

E has been owed mama time for a while now. Mama time--that would be time alone with me (and remember that I am not a mama--we pronounce it mumma, but mama seems more recognizably human when written down)--is a hot commodity around here. M has received a fair amount lately, due to emotional necessity (some bad days) and practical necessity (a seemingly endless string of teacher workdays and holidays). E has kind of been shafted, and she knows it.

So yesterday the long awaited E mama time was scheduled to occur, and, as luck would have it, it was art day. So off we went, just E and I, to the art museum, where the art object of the day was a Dubuffet sculpture. We made our own sculpture. E did a puzzle of the Dubuffet sculpture. We spent a long time in the children’s area where E carefully inspected all the exhibits and drew a picture of mountains and the ocean at night (dark blue sky). We had lunch at the café. We visited the galleries and E skipped around the empty ones. We brought Teddy and E’s new duck whom we named Tuffy after deciding he was a puffin after reading a magazine article about puffins before we left. E told me stories about Teddy and Tuffy. She also told me that organic shapes are squiggly shapes, which apparently she learned at preschool.

It reminded me how great art day is, and how great it is to be a four year old without an eight year old. At least sometimes.

[Don’t get me started on parents who do their kids’ art projects for them. Not with them. For them.]