Birthday Cards Gone Awry

Today I went present-shopping for our family friends, Nate and Anja, who are celebrating their birthdays soon.  I thought it might be nice to have Julia and Madeleine split the responsibility of making cards for their friends, and since Anja is turning four, I decided to let our own four-year-old do the honors.

Except that I forgot how nit-picky and fastidious Madeleine is about her art work.  Her whole idea was to draw a picture of herself giving Anja a birthday balloon on the front of the card.  What wound up happening was a series of brown heads that Madeleine deemed unacceptable and consequently colored in all brown, only to start over once again.  No matter how many times she tried, Madeleine was absolutely dissatisfied.  So, instead of Anja receiving a likeness of herself on her birthday card, she gets to be the lucky recipient of a bunch of flying turds, covering front, inside, and back of the card:

As well as a failed Anja attempt that came out more like Kenny from "South Park":

Once Madeleine gave up on drawing Anja, she began making birthday balloons, also brown, until I suggested she try some other colors.  She made a red, placenta-like balloon next (even she acknowledged it: "Uh, Mama, this one kinda looks like streaks of BLOOD.")  Ditching the red marker, Madeleine was then asking for help finding the yellow marker, only to order me out of the room as soon as I handed it to her.

MADELEINE: I don't want you to see, Mama, because it's a SURPRISE.  It's your FAVORITE thing.  So don't look.  But...it's NOT a Madeleine balloon.  So Mama.  Don't look.  And DON'T think about PUMPKINS.

So I didn't think about pumpkins, and BOY was I shocked when she unveiled her "pumpkin balloon" for me!:

To me, it looks like a cartoon representation of a Y and X sperm side by side.  Fits along nicely with the placenta and the turds.

At any rate, we never did get the drawing that Madeleine had aspired to make.  But that's okay; we got some ooey-gooey bodily function pictures instead, and what's funnier to kids than that?!?

In other, unrelated news: I am sad to report that unfortunately, Witcha became and amputee today:

Hopefully she can figure out how to ride one-legged on her broom.