Artwork

Today we had Stake Conference at church. If you're not Mormon, from the perspective of a child that means we sit for two hours in metal folding chairs in a dark room. (From the perspective of a grown up, it can also mean that we get to hear some potentially great talks from church leaders. Today we got to hear from Elder Uchtdorf, who dazzled as usual. It was a good meeting.) And all things considered, the boys did as well as could possibly be expected. They each spent a good part of the time drawing, and I was struck by how representative they are of how each of the boys approach things right now.

Here's Caleb's drawing.

It's detailed, thoughtful, constrained, realistic, and I think pretty impressive. It's a water park.

Here's Joseph's picture.

Imaginative, wild, unrealistic, mad-scientisty, and huge. The only reason it's not sixteen pieces of paper long is because I kept telling him no. Joseph always thinks outside the space he's given. When we get bigger paper for him to draw on, his ideas just grow proportionally. If we have one family over for dinner, why not two? And when we invite two, three would be better. Today he was thinking about designing an airplane a mile and a half wide so it could carry an extra huge amount of explosives. He'd like to buy the property next to ours to expand our yard. When he catches a snake out by a creek, his first thought is of how to breed it to get more snakes. He always thinks bigger and more.

Here's Isaac's.

I don't know how much of this picture is Isaac's age and how much is his personality, actually. The purple lines are a hive where all those little bugs live, and there are sleeping quarters somewhere in there. He did an especially adorable acting out of how they would fall asleep and snore. There were lots of dramatic interactions between the bugs as he put the stickers on the paper. It was all very cute.

I really, really like them all.