Ever since my second child was born, I always want to do more with the kids. More art. More reading. More letter of the day or other such activities. I especially wished I did more to help Elias observe advent, but since we moved among other things, it got a bit overlooked. So here we are in lent. I wish I could say we were doing something really cool and Elias was learning a whole lot. But….no. I did manage to print out a visual for the 40 days of lent, and he gets to put a dot marker dot on each day. He can see us getting closer to the cross….and the resurrection.
The other day when he put his dot for the day on the sheet he traced his finger over the remaining blank squares and said, “only this and this and thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis and Jesus will be here! I think Jesus will actually come tomorrow. I want him to come tomorrow.”
Me too, buddy. Me too.
But anyway….I digress.
I’ve been wanting to do more to prepare Elias for Easter so that he can really understand (or be closer to understanding) what it means when the day arrives. Since one or both of the boys have been sick for three weeks now, I am suffering from severe cabin fever. The rain is not helping. This morning we woke up with nothing to do and two sick boys. I decided to break out the Easter art! We did two Easter art projects today:
Project 1: The Cross
When Simon went down for his nap, I gathered some paper, paint, and masking tape. I taped a cross onto the paper, let Elias choose his paint colors, and let him at it. I asked him if he wanted to use a paint brush, a paint roller, or his fingers. He told me that I should choose so I chose the roller. He used that for about ten seconds, and then switched to his fingers. I think feeling the paint was therapeutic or something. He really got into it.
He was quite serious about filling the whole page.
They actually turned out quite stunning. I don’t think the picture below does them justice. If only the paper hadn’t rolled while drying. Maybe next time we’ll try it on a canvas, or perhaps I can try to flatten it under some heavy books. Anyway, here are the finished products:
Project 2: Crayon resist Easter Eggs
Later in the afternoon, it was time for another art project. I cut out some egg shaped papers, and got out the watercolors and a white crayon. We colored on the eggs with the white crayon first.
Then we painted over them to see our drawings magically appear.
This one was a bit of a dud with Elias. He did the project, but I think he was glad when he was finished. I thought it was super cool, but I guess they can’t all be winners. Here are his finished products. Elias did 3, and I did 1. Can you tell which one is mine?
This little monkey did a bit of art while we were painting eggs. I discovered about halfway through, though, that I wasn’t watching him close enough and he was mostly eating crayons, not coloring with them.
I looked in his mouth, and there was wax caked on the back of his front top teeth. Gross. It was not easy to get off! I spent about five minutes scraping and rubbing his teeth with a washcloth, getting bitten every few seconds. Once it hurt so bad that it brought tears to my eyes! That little rascal! Needless to say…this one won’t be using crayons again for awhile.