Coloring

This is how Emily colors, with complete abandon without regard to any sense of order or appropriate color schemes.  She just grabs a handful of crayons and gets busy.  She's a free spirit like that.  She does what she wants, when she wants and always (well, usually) wants to do it by herself.  She can be screaming in frustration, but will still refuse the tiniest bit of help.  Thus, she is foreign to me.  Does that sound harsh?  It's not meant to be.  I'm just saying that as far as our children go, Emily is not like me.  She did not inherit many of my traits.  Perhaps the dancing and a flair for the dramatic and perhaps that business of shutting down and refusing to tell us whats wrong when she's upset, but not much else.

But then there's Aidan.  Watching him grow and become this little person has been like peering through some kind of looking glass.  I see so much of myself in the way he behaves and reacts to things.  He needs a plan.  He needs instructions and he needs help.  A lot of help.  I think he feels like he needs an anchor, something or someone to reassure him that what he's doing is right.  He loves instructions.  He can play with his Trio blocks for an afternoon building project after project by following the instruction book.  Once he gets those down, he's happy to create on his own, but he likes having the rules.

When he colors he consults other material to get the picture correct with the right colors.  In this particular incident he was distressed that the Batman in the Fisher Price catalogue was grey and black and the Batman on the cover of his coloring book was blue and grey.  He didn't know what to do.   He kept asking me why this one was blue and that one was black.   I had to reassure him that it was fine that they were different and he decided that maybe Batman had two sets of boots and capes; one blue, one black.