Friday, May 29, 2009

Wildflowers, Interpreted

Due to a little "incident" yesterday evening (Cake aptly named this incident "When Ice Cream Turns into Tragedy"), the girls are enjoying themselves a Land Before Time glut this morning, leaving me with, ahhh----free time on my hands.

So Matt's been teaching nights for a change, so the girls and I hiked over to the Chocolate Moose for some ice cream--The Chocolate Moose, did you know, is immortalized in my favorite John Cougar Mellancamp music video:

After getting ice cream we usually walk over to Third Street Park to enjoy it. Last night there was a play practice going on in the outdoor theater, so the girls and I sat on some steps nearby to watch it. Next to the steps are a wall and a hill below it and Willow, who's been fascinated lately with jumping off of fairly high surfaces, was having me play Humpty Dumpty with her--I have to recite the poem as she acts it out. It was unfortunately quite distracting to the play people--in the distance they could apparently clearly observe a child jumping off of a high wall and lying crumpled on the ground below it for several seconds, before hopping up and doing the whole thing over and over again. There were a lot of blown lines, etc.

Sydney has the unhappy distinction of being the "little" sister, alas, and at one point I looked up just in time to see her not quite so much jump as lurch off of the same high wall, full of happy anticipation--yeah, when she lay crumpled on the ground below it, it sure as hell wasn't so I could finish the last two lines of the poem.

Anyway, the kiddo's ankle isn't sprained, I don't think, but it's sore, deserving of lots of foot baths and TV time and just generally getting carried around everywhere--not such a bad deal, when you think about it.

In other news, one of our favorite activities so far this summer is to do a wildflower walk--we walk around the neighborhood, picking wildflowers off of lawns (if they look unintended) and medians and ditches, and when we get home we try ineptly to identify them from our numerous library wildflower books and then we draw pictures of them.

I don't know what it is about wildflowers that seems to call for watercolors, but it's certainly our favorite medium:

That's me doing my darndest to paint a dandelion and a clover and a wild rose. Willow's daisy and clover are much more inspired:

I love the way she does the leaves on the daisy. It's not terribly accurate, but it's totally the way they SHOULD look, you know?

2 comments:

cake said...

glad to hear the injury isn't too serious. cosmo hurt his ankle one of the first times he jumped off a small ledge, when he was under 2 years old. he kept limping, and i was so concerned, we went to the doctor, and they did an x-ray. luckily,he was fine. we were advised to give him tylenol for a few days so he would "forget" to limp. i hate to say, it worked.

i did not know about the chocolate mooose being featured in the JCM video. loved seeing it.

nice water colors.

julie said...

I'm going to have to try the advice about the Tylenol, I think--I was avoiding it (except for nighttime) because I WANTED it to be sore so that Syd would remember to stay off of it, but today she's 1) still limping and 2) not complaining, so it's possible that, yeah, she's just kind of gotten into the habit of limping. If she's doing it tomorrow still, I'm def going to drug her all day.

I have this love of places that were location-shots in films. In Washington, Matt and I once found the Goonies house. It was awesome, as you can imagine. I'm kind of always on the search here for any of the houses from Breaking Away. I'd give anything for the quarry location, especially.