Elliot the Craft King

The other day I told Elliot that I was going to start calling him the craft king. He agreed that it was a good nickname for him. This kid spends HOURS every day covering our kitchen table with little scraps of paper, tape, and glue. Thank goodness that Preschool is able to be an outlet for some of his crafting energy. He will sometimes come home from preschool and try to make the preschool crafts again. The most recent of those was a turkey on a popsicle stick.

Elliot's current obsession is mazes. But thanks to his daddy, Elliot thinks that the best mazes should include portals, walls that you can blast through, and plenty of poisonous snakes and monsters to fight. Having him explain his mazes is the best. He will at instruct me at breakneck speed about how the spiders that have lots of legs need to be blasted 10 times but the ones with just the normal amount legs only need to be shot one time, and that I have to fight all the ninjas but only one of them has the key. An essential element to completing mazes is making the appropriate sound effects to accompany all the blasting and fighting. 

Maze by Elliot for me on the left, and one by me for him on the right

Elliot has latched onto the idea that he can bribe/punish us by making/withholding cards that he makes for us. It is common for him to scream "I won't make you cards for a zillion days!" on his way to time out. Cards are commonly earned by making his favorite dinner or by making mazes for him to do. He leaves them by our door and gives us strict instructions to not look at them until we go to bed.

One time he asked Aaron to make him a card. I thought it was pretty impressive. It had a picture of stick figure Elliot holding his orange blanket with a couple rainbows and stars in the background and it said "I love you little buddy." When Elliot saw it in the morning, he immediately launched into a critique about how it only had two rainbows when really it needed at least eight. 

This kid is obsessed with rainbows. We tried teaching him the ROY G BIV trick as we got tired of telling him the color order time after time, but the presence of indigo confused him (me too, buddy). Luckily he memorized the order himself after cranking out a few hundred little rainbows. Every preschool class the kids practice writing their names and I guess he must be fast because his name slips come home with the backs covered in little rainbows that he drew.  

A classic card, halloween colors edition

Elliot is 100% convinced that he found Aaron in BYU magazine. I think it is a pretty good doppelganger!

Rancho Sahuarita had a chalk festival by the lake this year. It was right up Elliot's ally! The town taped off a bunch of squares to make a kids drawing zone. As you curved around the lake, there was a section with 3ft x 3ft squares for the "emerging artists" competition which seemed to be geared to teenagers, and then there were big areas where local artists made some gorgeous chalk drawings. Elliot says he wants to be an artist when he grows up, so he appreciated seeing them at work. We went back the next day to see the finished (but somewhat smeared by people walking/biking over them) products the next day. 

Let me slip in my own artistic success of late- I have learned how to put Annie's hair in pigtails! It doesn't last through a nap, but it sure is dang cute.

Elliot notices flowers wherever we go. He loves picking them to make his own "gardens."
Also, don't you just love how natural kids look when posing for pictures?

Our Halloween decorations multiplied 100x this year because Elliot kept begging me to cut out mores ghosts for him to tape around the house and outside for the trick-or-treaters to see. He got a "How to Draw Monsters" book from the library and cranked out tons of little monster pictures that he cut out, even after Halloween was over. He climbs through the closet to slip his decorations into the box of Halloween stuff for next year.