Christmas Crafting

It's beginning to feel a lot like Panic and that means facing down the dreaded Day of Painting. Long ago, in the foolish way that young mothers have, thinking that they should do crafts with their children and take them to the library and stuff, around Christmas time, I stripped down Elphine and Alouicious and put them in front of a lot of little wooden objects with some paint. They lathered it everywhere and had a brilliant time and then we bestowed their foul looking objects on people we love, or maybe better to say, people who love them. Since then it has turned into this wretched and, for me, dreaded, birthright. “When are we going to paint?” they ask every year, like its a done deal. Well this year I compounded the trauma by “thinking it would be fun to build some models”. I know, it's the human problem, found in all places and all times, of thinking it would be nice to do something, discovering in the middle of it that it's not nice at all, and then immediately forgetting how it was nice and having a false belief that it was nice until you're in the middle of it again. Childbirth comes to mind. Anyway, at least when I had laid out the array of objects and paint and tiny tiny tiny almost microscopic nails and very weak bits of wood, I had the sense to decide that we would take off from school to do them. Children in school have Christmas parties and stuff (I hope you hear the full range of emotion I'm pouring into the word “stuff”). I don't want to do this on my laundry and cooking dinner time. No, we will finish The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I decided, and then Craft.

So, first I built this, while Baby Elpeth sat and sucked her fingers and chattered about paint.

And then I built a train for Marigold that I didn't bother to photograph because it looks exactly like the truck and who are we kidding. And then I built Romulus' little very easy car that he could have built himself but he couldn't lift himself up off the floor from all the whinning. And then I cut Gladys' sail after she! and she alone! built the whole sailboat. And then I tried to glue the tiny metal whatevers to the thin “fabric”, that's way too generous a term, for her covered wagon. And then I examined poor Alouicious' airplane and decided we didn't care, neither of us, and oh my word, whose idea were all the little bits and the little tiny nails anyway oh my word, oh my Lord, for the love of all that is……

Then we tried to clear up so that we could paint.

Romulus achieved a nice fire effect on his car I think.

Elsbeth's truck.

Gladys' sailboat.

I didn't bother to photograph anything by Marigold because she just smeared everything with lots of black paint, and then herself, and slung it around, and it was a giant mess. Elphine painted a lot of little clay objects she'd made and still has to finish her covered wagon. And the boys painted some big giant letters which I'm trying to fix to make less messy and weird. And after everyone had wandered away to get in the bath, I painted the frame of a mirror for the girls.

That, there, is the full extent of my artistic ability. “That's really good,” said Romulus in amazement.

“Thanks” I said.

“That's all she knows how to draw” whispered Alouicious to Romulus as I tried to fix the ever growing flower at the bottom.

“Go away” I said.

And then I restored my sense of sanity with a glass of wine and baked some nice little white fishes and made a white wine, caper, cream sauce and, in a sort of twilight zone dinner time, they were all eaten up.

“These are really good,” said Romulus, “they're a lot like fish sticks.”

Well, so I'm not a total failure. I can at least produce a dinner as good as fish sticks.