Artwork

It has been a very artistic day in the Rowe household so far, beginning with the girls discussing Ethan's self-portrait in our bedroom when they came in to wake me up.

MADELEINE: Julia, look!  It's the Statue of LIBERTY!

The Statue of Liberty


JULIA: (condescending) Madeleine.  That's not the Statue of Liberty.  That's DADDY.
MADELEINE: He's a GIRL?!?
JULIA: (patiently) Madeleine, did you know that Daddy used to have really long hair, longer than YOURS?


Madeleine even made her very own self-portrait, complete with a back story as she colored it.

MADELEINE: Mama!  That's ME!  And...I'm ALL ALONE!  So, I'm CRYING.  I have to draw some tears!  
ME: Oh, poor Madeleine, all alone!
MADELEINE: And then I'm gonna draw YOU coming!
ME: Do I come to rescue you?
MADELEINE: Uh...you come to HUG me.
ME: Okay, so I come to comfort you.

So, she drew me standing next to her crying figure.  And this is what we look like:

I don't know why I'm a creepy death demon.  What, oh what, would Freud have to say about this??

In contrast, Julia went with a non-eerie artistic vein in her artwork today.  She proudly announced that she was going to write a new book, one whose main character had come to her yesterday after I picked the kids up from daycare.  So this morning so studiously began working on:

Madetha.
by Julia Rowe


In case you are understandably confused about how on earth to pronounce this character's name, it's Ma-dee-tha.  "Because, Mama, when we were leaving daycare I had this idea that I wanted to write a book about a girl and her name would be MADETHA.  And look, do you notice it starts out with the SAME letters as Madeleine?"

Here is the first page of this new book:

"Madetha alwas wolkt on cup stillts."
I wonder if Madetha is the *same* kid in the "Moms are speshle" book who always walks on stillts with her speshle mom.


Pg. 2:

"She had three sisters named Matlda, Athina and Fiona.  Fiona had brown har, Matlda had yellow and Athina had red."
JULIA: Mama, I just PUT that so that, like, in the picture, you know WHO'S WHO.  Like, so you're not sitting there saying, "Which one is Fiona?"


Pg. 3:

"Madetha!' clad Matlda one day.  'It's time to go to shchoole.'  'Ohka camiig' sade Madetha."
JULIA: And Mama?  Look at this picture.  Does she LOOK like she's HAPPY about going to school?

Unfortunately, Madetha's story came to an anticlimactic conclusion right there, as Julia decided she wanted to gallop rather than finish writing.

Madeleine, meanwhile, continued on with more ominous and menacing artwork, including this picture of Emily stuck inside a twister:

As well as this snowman that looks like she belongs in a Tim Burton film:

I don't even want to know why she's brown.

Speaking of things that are brown, Julia had to rush to the bathroom for an emergency poop a few minutes before we needed to leave for school.  Although I believe she truly intended to heed my warning to be as fast as possible, she just couldn't help drifting off into imaginary-Julia-land.

JULIA: (shouting from behind the closed bathroom door) Mama?  I just have to ask you something.
ME: What is it?
JULIA: I was wondering if you ever, like, LOOK UP at the bathroom ceiling, and, like, imagine you SEE things that are not really there.
ME: Uh, yeah.  Sometimes.
JULIA: I just like to look up there, and, like, imagine I see, like, people in wedding dresses getting MARRIED.

How romantic.  Maybe she write a book about the wedding of the Ceiling People, and Madeleine can provide creepy illustrations.