The Maker

Today, I realized that my younger child is like me in a way that my older child is not.

When D was little, we spent a lot of time at the library. For a small town, the Sherman library was not too shabby. At some point, D figured out that there were craft books at the library. Man, I hated when D picked out one of them. Although we had a lot of supplies, a specific craft inevitably meant a trip to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, and even though I've spent hours in many of them, I still don't understand how they're laid out.

D LOVED to make things. D still loves to make things. What all has D done? There was a beads phase.

It coincided with the Harry Potter phase.
I'm laughing about D asking the Easter face painter at my parents' church to try a snake.

There was a papier mache phase.

A Maya ceremonial plate. D also made a fish and a thunderbird, among other creatures.

And then there was the time that D became a self-taught balloon-animal maker.

When Mal was about 9 months old and D seemed securely out of craft mode, we donated 3 under-bed-storage boxes full of supplies to our local unschooling group for use at a retreat.

But then D moved on and learned (alone, no lessons; maybe some YouTube tutorials) how to sew. And how to sculpt clay, from forming to firing to painting. 

Throughout all of this time, D has also drawn. A lot. Thousands and thousands of pictures, and I haven't seen one of them in about four years. Ahh, teenagers.

Facilitating D's creative passions is what we do. Even when it's made me really tired, wandering clueless around a big box craft store for hours.

Mal... is a consumer more than a creator right now. I know that consuming gets a bad wrap (I just had to stop reading an interview with some author in Texas Monthly because she was bagging on that kind of thing), but it behooves creators to have consumers, doesn't it? Anyway. Mal is also right on brand with my lack of desire to complete crafting projects.

James's work is having a create-your-own Mario Kart contest. This should be right up Mal's alley because, Mario. I asked him if he wanted to do it, and for about a day and a half didn't get an answer. Then he said he did want to do it. We got a box, and I asked him how to design it. He said it needed to have a white circle with an "M" on it, like Mario's real car in the game (which we don't have).

Mal also said that the car needed to be red, like Mario's in the game. I asked, "How will we get it red? Paint? Or construction paper?" Faced with the extra work, Mal decided, "It doesn't need to be red." Later, we were talking about the wheels. I had a few plates to use for wheels, and asked Mal if he wanted to put some sticker letters on them or something. He said, "There aren't letters on the wheels in the game." I said, "That's okay. We can do whatever we want." "I'll just leave them plain." "But they're white. You just want white wheels?" "Never mind. We don't need wheels."

Needless to say, what we came up with was extremely minimalist, because Mal was just not interested in investing too much time into the project.

This is exactly how I've approached his Mario "kingdoms" that we've been making out of cardboard boxes. I've realized that he's at an age that even suggesting something poorly seems like magic to him, and he's pleased with whatever I do, even if it's messy. He's also willing to overlook inaccuracy, to a degree.

Anyway, here's what we came up with.

He did want the steering wheel to turn, so I made that happen.