Project Mode

Sometime around 2:00 p.m. today the kids went into a hyper-focused project mode while I worked in the kitchen. While I was sliding up and down the counter preparing pizza dough and marinara, and juicing lemons for Jordan lemonade (a lemonade slushy with blended up mint leaves invented by Les), they fished for tape and thread and such in our supply baskets, becoming very busy and quiet behind me. Only when I was mostly finished did I grab the camera.

Project mode for their little bodies generally mirrors my deep focus in the kitchen--they seem to pick up on my physical indications of determination to complete a culinary task. I mildly ignore them or answer their questions with a quick "mmm-hmmm" or "I don't know" or "that's a good question" hoping to return personal ownership of their time back to them. With my back to them I sometimes try to analyze what it is that holds their interest for long-ish periods of time. Is the secret the tools or the experimentation or the lack of distraction, or is it that they came up with the ideas without my preconceived plans? 

Just as a report of where they are creatively-speaking:

A worked on portraits featuring bees and flowers and smiling ladies, but mostly the Sharpie marker in her hand was making it all  worth it. How do they find those things? I wonder if she creates in an attempt to please me (because she draws a portrait of me each day, it seems) or if their something intrinsically satisfying about the mom-portrait period of her artistic development. She also spent a fair amount time supervising J's efforts, telling him his project was awesome, and stepping in (literally) to E's work to offer her Sharpie and tell him it was the best spaceship she's ever sat in.

J's project today was a a windlass, the simple machine used for lifting heavy weights. He was highly motivated to figure this out due to his determination to earn Cub Scout arrowpoints, of course, and he had to work at several parts of it due to his failed first attempts. In the end he made it work perfectly.

E built a space ship out of boxes in the recycling, and then noted "numbers" he needed to navigate through the solar system (or perhaps he was just practicing his penmanship in flight. At one point he allowed A to ride with him, but she eventually got the boot because she was talking too much.