crafty crafty

I've been thinking that I need to do more arts and crafts with my toddler. Every week at her French class we do a craft, and it's usually the most frustrating part of the class for me. We're not actually learning any French at that point, I'm just trying to keep Pippa from getting marker on her clothes (why markers, Madame??? why not crayons?) and from destroying the craft before it's done. All she wants to do is scribble, and if stickers of any kind are involved, she immediately wants to rip them off, put them on again, and rip them off again, and for stickers that usually doesn't even last one time. Then she wants me to "fix it".  Sorry kid, I can't.

My parents saved some art/crafts from when I was young and I always thought they were kind of ugly and dumb. I thought that would magically change when I had my own kids but no, I still think 95% of toddler "art" or "crafts" are ugly and dumb. Even when it's created by my kid. Especially because really it was created by me, while attempting to keep my child from eating a glue stick.

But I put it up on the fridge anyway.

Mostly because otherwise she destroys them. I didn't get last week's craft (a coloring page of a fruit bowl, with the fruits labeled in French, mounted on construction paper) up on the fridge in time, and she destroyed it while trying to demount it. Taking things apart is what she wants to do all the time.

 The other two- to three-year-olds in the class exhibit a spectrum of craft behavior, from the little girl who sits there passively while her mother creates an immaculate, Martha Stewart Living type craft, to the exuberant Picasso type who is actually into this whole craft business, to more moderate scribblers. But all of them at least sit more nicely than she does (even the ones who are as energetic as she is otherwise).

It occurs to me (with a sinking feeling) that maybe we ought to do more crafts in order to develop the sitting still and concentrating skills that I've been waiting to exist in order to make craft-making enjoyable. But of course, enjoyable for who? For me, that's who. I don't like doing crafts with her right now; it's messy, it costs money, the finished product is pointless. I want to make crafts with her to give as gifts, but I know that it would be very frustrating to try to make something like a footprint penguin or whatever, because she would stamp all over the paper, or wiggle her foot, or say "I want to do it!" and grab for the marker just as I'm writing "Merry Christmas", and the finished product would look like Martha Stewart Dying.

But the rainy season is here in Vancouver. While I try to get out even in the rain, sometimes it just isn't possible. Maybe I should be using that time to get her involved in some art.

She will enjoy it, right? I know she does. And maybe slowly that will help her learn that craft time is when we sit nicely and create.

Maybe eventually nicely enough that mommy can use the bathroom in peace.

"It's Daddy!" "My, you have done a good job there of capturing your father's basic existential angst. Well done, child."