Saturday, May 17, 2014

Galleria Of Scribbles

Wanna make a bet? I bet my kitchen is more hideous than your kitchen! To prove it to you, I present Exhibit A:


Lime green cabinets. Dirty old brick counters. Non-matching tile backsplash. But wait people, the walls used to be ORANGE. Yep. The second we moved in, I eradicated that Cheeto-vomit color. And trust me, I know what Cheeto-vomit looks like. It looked like the sixties came to visit and had explosive diarrhea all over my kitchen.

The cabinets in the picture are the only cabinets in my entire kitchen. The ONLY cabinets. This makes life...interesting. Like when the canned goods starts to invade the pots and pans. Or when the cups spill out onto the plates. What's behind the Cream of Wheat? That's always a fun game. And where did I put my spatula? It's a total mystery!

Also: that's the only window in my entire kitchen. Such a sad, sad little thing. My husband and I are finally going to pull the trigger and get a long overdue, mini kitchen make-over. The impending remodel is probably the most exciting thing in our lives right now. And the fact that I have an entire box of oreo cookies. Oh yeah,  I guess the baby should be added to that list too.

The wall to the right of what you see in the above picture used to be home to a really large and ugly piece of hotel art. No, literally, I bought it from a hotel. It was a painstaking task to find a piece of art as ugly as my kitchen. But I did it, finally. And then after seven years of staring at the ugly abstract bowl of fruit that was trying just a little too hard to be a Picasso, I snapped and had an all-out verbal altercation with that hideous painting.

To try to salvage my sanity and restore order in our home, my husband installed two long wires from IKEA that we decided to use to hand the kids' art. It was the perfect solution: piles and piles of kid art were beginning to form all over the house in violation of multiple sections of the local fire code AND we just happened to have a nasty bowl of abstract fruit art that needed to be eliminated.

The result, voila:


So much better. And every piece of art tells a story. Every piece is an original. Hey, if I'm going to hang ugly scribbles on a wall, they might as well be from my own kids right?

I'm a baby person. I always have been. I LOVE babies. But having bigger kids, I'm learning, is pretty cool too. Hands down my favorite thing about older kids is the art that they produce from the depths of their larger-than-life imaginations.

This little masterpiece is my current favorite. Jacob sat down this morning and drew him. I think he is supposed to be a character from a tv show. But I'm not familiar with any tv shows starring walking hairy pickles that look like they want to eat you alive. But it's cute, right? In a creepy, millipede kind of way.


Jacob made me this for Mother's Day. In case you didn't know, colorful hand turkeys are the new symbol of motherly love. Also note: the strange pop-up face floating above the turkey.

 
This was also a Mother's Day gift. Jacob made this at his babysitter's house. I pretty much love it. I love that Jacob can't draw hearts so it is pretty obvious the babysitter drew the heart and Jacob colored it in. I can imagine the babysitter trying to coax Jacob into drawing a heart and him refusing, stubbornly.
 
 


This is the best part. Clearly, I'm Mother of the Year.

 
This is Ryan's contribution. He actually colors all the time but somehow, his art seems to disappear. Like into the trash can. Oops.
 

 
 
Jacob told me this is a kite. He cut a whole in it. Clearly he needs to learn a little bit more about wind, aerodynamics, and lift. But it's cute.
 

 
Airplanes. So, so cute.
 
 
But most of all, I love Jacob's people. They are so happy and have such wide stances. But when your legs jut straight out of your large circular belly, I guess you need to have a low center of gravity.
 
I love when they have fingers but no feet.
 




This is our family. We are all holding hands. I look like I'm performing in an amateur version of the Nutcracker, except my unruly hair would never get me onto a real ballet stage. My husband has a heart...in his belly.  None of us have pupils. But we still manage to look blissfully happy. Clearly we are all on drugs. I mean, why else would a group of four hold hands and synchronize-prance under the sun?

 
Sigh, kid art is the best :)


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