Friday, October 26, 2012

fish. or rabbit.


OK, well I'm starting off badly here because this blog is meant to be a journal of my photographic efforts as well as my daily life with Tim.  And here it is, my first phone camera shot.  Bad.

But what it is of, I wanted to document before it got lost, or forgotten, or passed over.  I feel that quite keenly these days, that each new word, or each new accomplishment, if it's not recorded in the moment will quickly be swallowed up, and soon it will be difficult to remember that there was a time before he could say "moon" or, in this example, make a drawing of a fish (or a rabbit). This is his first representational drawing, I believe, and that's why I want to record it here.

See that green splodge, in the upper right hand corner?  I started it.  Then Tim took the green felt-tip off me, and gave it some more colour and more shape, and when he had finished he pointed to it and made his sound for fish: opening and closing his mouth so his lips give a soft little pop.  A fish!  He drew a fish! I thought excitedly.  So I grabbed the orange pen and drew a couple more - and he decorated them a bit with the green pen he was still holding.

Then I remembered that his sound for fish is pretty much the same as his sound for rabbit (you see, it's based on the sound of a rabbit twitching his nose and munching on a carrot, but in Tim's mouth it comes out pretty much the same as the fish).  And I began to wonder if perhaps his green drawing had been of a rabbit, not a fish? So I attempted to draw in some rabbits, to see if they got a bigger reaction from him.  They didn't.

Fish or rabbit, rabbit or fish, it's definitely a drawing.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

loves working in the kitchen






...though it is sometimes hard to push the drawer closed, past one's post-lunch tummy.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

swings



I love these photos.  They're the kind that I love, loud and proud, while people I show them to just smile and nod politely.  There are a few in that category (this is another one) but it doesn't bother me at all.  It's just curious.  I am glad I can post them here for myself, where I can just enjoy looking at them.  

Monday, October 1, 2012

garden grows


One thing I like about hanging out with kids - Tim in particular - is that not everything we do needs to be on an enormous scale.  Our activities can stay on the small side and stay fun for anyone with a short attention span, yet still be a great opportunity for learning new skills and new things about the world.  

This, for example, is our new Veggie Box Garden.  The old wooden box was sitting in a neglected corner of the yard, filled with old dirt from past gardening experiments and beginning to attract a load of springtime weeds.  I wanted to keep the box, but I was sick of looking at the weeds, so with a very small amount of digging and raking and some (oldish) seeds from my stash, it has become Tim's very first, tiny, veggie garden.  


We planted a row each of carrots and tomatoes.
Conveniently, the two kinds of seeds I had on hand are two of the veggies he can readily identify in pictures and in the flesh.
Not that he likes eating either of them (yet).


Planting a seed really is an act of hope, isn't it? I don't suppose that Tim understands what any of this is for, and of course it may not eventuate into anything - those seeds were rather old, after all.  But Tim loves to water our garden box every day, and he'll bring me the watering can if it's slipped my mind or if I'm even contemplating skipping it.  It's the first long-term project we've started together.

And you never know, one day soon we might see some little green shoots pointing up out of the earth.