Children just love to draw, don’t they. It’s probably one of the first ways that they can more permanently influence something outside of themselves. While the toys always get picked up, and the block towers always get knocked down, the drawing they give to Mom and Dad that hangs on the fridge remains. An artifact of something they’d done before. While looking at their art is something quite special, the act of transferring pigment or a marking to another surface is the stuff of magic. The reason many people seem to want to write a novel (or is it a screenplay now?) is to leave something they’d created behind. In some ways the act of recording something, be it information or something more inexplicable, seems more long-lasting than buildings, sales quotas, or other human activities.
Now that we’ve finally moved into our new home we’re trying to decide a good place to put the drawing supplies. Lots of questions run through our minds. How many walls are open to his indiscriminate scribblings? Will he be able to have easy access to many colors? Will he put them away? Where can he go to get paper? These are simple questions but the answers are often complex. We don’t have all of the answers yet, but one of the answers recently got answered when he was wanting to draw. A makeshift box served as the drawing surface to hold the paper, but the more interesting part was a used tea tin (Dad has lots of those, thankfully) could be used to hold a great many crayons. The question was whether or not he would put the crayons back and re-affix the lid after he was done drawing. Thankfully he did. With that we sang a song all the way upstairs to show Mom and put the artwork on the fridge. Where do crayons go: check.