About once a day the kids go poking through my art supply cabinets in the kitchen and pull out paper and supplies for a self-styled project.

Watercolor painting is their favorite. They spread their canvases out on the floor, grab some cups of water, and go for it.

Nutmeg is the most prolific artist so far. On this day, she had a line of about ten pages spread out:

“This is you when you were a kid, Mom,” she told me.

I asked her what the red dot was.

“It’s your belly button.”

I had a very distinctive belly button as a baby, apparently.

“And this is you when you were grown up!”

“Why is my hair green?”

“Because you have kids.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

Boo was pleased that she had taught herself to paint hearts.

Junior copied her: a bleeding heart

Junior’s next project:

The creature in the lower left is a No-Eyed Monster.

“It’s kind of tricky,” he explained, “because you have to figure out which set of footprints leads to the monster.”

Cool.

This was one of Manny’s painting projects from a year and a half ago.

I didn’t get a picture of his most recent project, but his techniques haven’t changed much.
If something’s working for you, why change it, right?