Thursday, March 29, 2007

If only fishsticks were sought by MoMA

My children often ask me to draw things for them. “Can you draw me a butterfly? Can you draw me a unicorn? Can you draw me the London Bridge?”

Now, like most people, I have certain…limitations.

One of them is that I am a rotten artist.

I mean, I am bad.

I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. I can’t draw a curved one, either. I can’t even manage ‘random dot’ art, OK?

I am art challenged.

So when you ask me to draw a princess fairy unicorn?

You’re going to get something that looks like Cookie Monster, and I will have no idea why it turned out like that.

This limitation is well-known to my children.

“Honey,” I will say as they rush in clutching markers and construction paper eagerly asking me to draw the Taj Mahal. “Mommy just really isn’t that good at drawing.”

So tonight, I made fishsticks. (Yes. Dinner of champions. Don’t pester me, I’m under a lot of stress right now.) And, as I usually do to hide the fact that this is actually Mommy taking a night off from making, you know, ‘dinner’ dress things up a little, I arranged the fishsticks in festive patterns and drew squiggles and dots and whatnot on the plates.

Boo Bug was delighted, because she has hated everything I’ve made for dinner lately. Roasted garlic pork with twice-baked potatoes? Bleh! Grilled steak with potatoes gratin? YUCK! Sausage in polenta? ACK!!

She swarmed into her chair and regarded her plate happily.

“Mommy!” she exclaimed. “You are an artist! You’re a food artist!”

Hey! You know what?

Yes. Yes I am.

Just, uh, don’t ask me for fairy unicorn princess tater tots, OK?

4 comments:

Amy Lane said...

Yeah...

Real food w/a salad? Uh...

Pancakes in the shape of a heart for dinner? You're a golden goddess...

At least we can be a golden goddess sometimes...

buffi said...

oooooh, you're good! I'll have to keep this in mind next week when I don't feel like cooking supper. Although, SugarPlum is 10 now and I have a feeling she might not fall for it. Of course, my answer to that is "This is dinner. Eat it or don't. I don't care."

I'm such a great mom.

heh.

Jessica said...

I am SO with you on the art thing. Why do kids always want you to draw something complicated? Geez. What is wrong with a house? You know, a box with a triangle on top and a curly-smoke thingy coming out of a rectangle chimney? I could totally draw that. I did a million times as a kid. But no, my son wants me to draw "Superman and Batman and Hulk fighting bad guys." Uh, yeah. Right.

Rena said...

Were you wearing your fabulous new apron?