Art, bike, and other fun stuff

I have two posts to make, and this is the first one. The pictures from our trip this weekend will be in the next post.

First, some random fun pictures from the last week. Here is one of Carter playing his drum:



It's so cute to watch him start to get into making music. He loves his harmonica that Nana Anna (his great-grandmother) gave him, and he is finally starting to strum (rather than just bang on) his guitar. Drums and percussion instruments are definite favorites, as they are with all kids this age. He likes to make up songs, and is ever so gradually starting to sing in tune!

Here are some cute pictures from a bath the other night. He had eaten a bunch of blackberries and really needed it!



I was taking pictures to send to Doug (who was out of town) and Carter started making funny faces. Here is his kissy face:



And a happy face:



And a sad face:



We've been talking about emotions a lot and trying to help him start to articulate how he is feeling, and playing games like this is something he really finds funny.

After not really being interested in his bike for a while, he's recently started riding it again.



He also likes to "work on it".



Here's a little video of him riding it a few days ago. He's starting to pick up a little speed now, though he has yet to take his feet off the ground and really balance on it.



Another thing we've been doing a bit more of lately is art. He's starting to get to the point that he's actually interested in playing with art materials for more than two minutes at a time, so it's more fun for both of us. ;-) His drawing is slowly starting to become more meaningful, and his fine motor skills are getting better. Here is a picture of him drawing with markers. He very carefully drew a bunch of concentric ovals, and when he got close to the point where the shape would close, he slowed down and tried very hard to make the ends meet. You can see several places where he went back over the closing point several times with the marker. It was really interesting to watch him draw something so deliberately.



I bought him a big t-shirt to serve as an art smock. It should get lots of cool paint marks on it in the next year or so!



I finally decided to let him try his hand at tempera paints. It wasn't nearly as messy as I'd feared, and he really liked them.





The paint set only had six colors, and so when he asked me for brown paint, I showed him how to mix colors to make it. He was really fascinated! We'll have to do more color mixing soon.



I took a video of him painting, and it's pretty typical of a 2.5 year-old. I keep reading that with kids this age, it's about the process, not the product. I believe it!



Here are the results of his first experience with tempera paints. Cool, eh?



I have a scrapbook to keep samples of his art in, and those will definitely be going in it. I think it will be cool to see how his paintings and drawings change over time.

I'll try to make another post tomorrow with pictures form our trip. Happy Labor Day!