What can I do with my children?

I have always believed in spending time with our children meaningfully.  That is one of the chief reasons why I had left my previous job.  What can we, as parents, do with them then?  Tons of things!  Though our energy levels are dipping with the gradual scaling of our ages, we can pick things that require us less energy to do with our little tots.

One of those that I tried over the past few days was drawing.  Now, I am not much of an artist myself, to begin with.  But we can have fun drawing, I thought.  Our children (especially Rachel) had been drawing in play-school.  Our elder girl has been expressing herself rather well with pictures but our boy seemed to be having some trouble with pictures.

I had picked up this book on 'Cartoon drawing for kids' earlier and bought it for spending time together with our jewels.  That night, I took out a drawing block and got the elder two to sit with me.  Kayleen, unfortunately, is a little too young for such an activity and this will have to be redone with her later.

I told Rachel and Felix that we were learning how to draw.  I showed them how to imitate drawings we selected from the book and talked them through, step-by-step, to getting the drawings done.  The first one was of a hippopotamus.


Rachel is taking an example of the book's and my drawing



The duo enjoyed the whole process and we moved on to two other pictures - one of a man and another of a lion.  At the end of it, they were told how nicely they have done and how cute the pictures were.  They, too, were happy with their drawings.  Rachel said that she remembered how to draw the 'hippo' and would bring this new found knowledge to play-school the next day.  We totally enjoyed this short activity we had together.


Daddy's impression of the old man




Felix points to his impression of the same picture



Rachel's drawing of a hippopotamus and Felix's lion

Their drawings might have been much improvised from the ones in the book, but we spent time together and I gave them an idea of how drawings can go.  In my eyes, their little pictures are the most adorable ones my children had proudly produced that night.