Thursday, June 28, 2012

Apples & Oranges

Right after Michael Jackson died, we were seeing his face all over magazine covers and tabloids at the checkout stands. The girls were very intrigued by him and wanted to know who he was. It didn't seem to do him justice to simply say, "He was a singer", so each time a song by him would come on the radio I would say, "This is Michael Jackson."

I hadn't done that in awhile and a few days ago while we were driving, the song "Billie Jean" came on. I turned it up, and out of curiosity, asked the kids, "Do you know who sings this"?. Tate had no clue, but the girls both said semi-confidently, "Michael Jackson". "That's right!" I said, "How did you know that?". "I could tell by the music", Reese said.

I felt as though I had finally accomplished my task of teaching them to be able to recognize probably the most popular artist of my time until she continued, "I was gonna say either Michael Jackson or Elvis...I get those two mixed up sometimes."

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Draw Like the Wind

Thanks to the introduction by my sister and niece, our family has become quite enamored with the game Draw Something on our phones/ipods. Basically, a techie version of Pictionary that you play against other people. When we first started playing, Drue astonished me with her undiscovered artistic talent. That girl could draw! And, she's a great little guesser too.

As the weeks went by, her drawing sort of took a step backward in ability. I think she just got in a hurry and wanted to get the picture finished quickly, so she just scribbled down whatever. This tends to be her approach to life as well. She's more focused on getting a particular task finished quickly, rather than taking her time and really appreciating it, and give it her all sometimes.

"Ugh...Drue. I have no idea what this is," I've said a few times as I marched into her room and requested she give me a hint, or just tell me outright what she drew. Once, she accidentally picked a word she was unfamiliar with to draw a picture of. So, instead, she just wrote the word with her finger and that's what I saw when I went to guess her picture. Then she decided she'd do that more and more. She would start to draw the picture and then end up writing the actual word on there. What in the world? So I teasingly gave a her a hard time about it.

"Try and draw the picture, goofy," I said. "No more of this writing the word stuff. Just draw the picture as best as you can, and if we can't figure it out, we'll ask you for a hint".

It's funny when you are playing multiple people because you sometimes forget who you're drawing to at the time. I once thought I was drawing David the word "Rapture" so I drew Heaven's Gates and people floating up to it. I thought it was very cleverly done, when Drue came down with her IPod and said, "What the heck?". Oops.

The other night we were playing back and forth before bed and I laughed out loud when I saw what was coming through from her. Knowing I had just talked to her about not drawing the word but trying to draw the picture, I watched as a message came through from her on the game to my phone, "Don't tell Mom..." and underneath she wrote the word "lizard". Of course, I called her into our room and busted her for it. She thought she had sent her "drawing" to David's phone!

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