Routine is great for toddlers. But it is great for me too. I have a certain list of things that I must do each day – whether it be 5 minutes or an hour, some time must be spent each day on these things. I have learned this about myself. If I devote some of my time an attention to this list of things every day, my life is just…better. It is a simple list, the items sort of no-brainers. Dishes. Laundry. Play with Ben. Life is all about balance, and I'm still figuring out what all I need to be making time for.
Creative play is one of those things I have been sorely neglecting over the past several years. Now that I have an impressionable little boy toddling around after me, copying what I do, I pay a lot more attention to what it is I do and don't do. I have always wanted to encourage creativity in my children, whenever I had them. My problem is that I often make things too complicated, so then I never do anything.
But I decided you don't have to spent a couple hours on a painting in order to be creative. Maybe you doodle for 5 minutes in your journal. Maybe you nap a photo of the perfect summer Poppy. Maybe you bake a cake from scratch, or look differently at some mundane daily item and see something else in it. That kind of thing I can do every day.
I loved school. LOVED it. You sit there and drink in new things, think about them, apply them, practice them. But I loved getting assignments. I wanted to see how far off track I could get while still working within the boundries of the assignment. What could I come up with that no one else would? It gave me direction, and I always came up with something. When I graduated, that all went away, and I miss it.
Just for the fun of it, one day I asked my facebook friends to give me some words. I didn't tell anyone what they were for, I just wanted some random words. And they gave me some great ones! It is my personal random word generator. Now we see what I come up with.
I started with what I considered one of the most easy and fun words of all: candy! (Thanks Kara!). I love LOVE candy. I love to eat it, I love the wrapping, I love the colors. I could spend days making art around candy (or just eating it). But, all I really did was just sketch in my journal late one night after Ben had gone to bed. Really I just need to exercise my left brain, not create dramatic frameable works of art. So I pulled out my mechanical pencil and my favorite little sparkle paints (very hard to photograph, by the way), and just played.
So then, I'd have to say I'm happy with what I did. It was fun! And really, that is kind of the point…