Future Foodie? Budding Artist? How About Both

I know I’ve alluded to it before, but the little goddess is really getting into drawing. She’s always had a love of painting (paper, rocks, shells, her one male baby doll Bubba) and she loves to craft things (though she still needs to learn that tape cannot stick everything together)…but the drawing is something different. She’s done it as long as any of her other art, but this is the medium which she has begun to pursue most diligently and with the greatest success.

I don’t know how to compare her artistic skills to other kids in the 7- to 8-year realm. I know many of her reading and writing skills (though not all) are already a year or two above her grade level, but drawing is trickier to gauge. But why compare against any standard anyway, right? She’s a damned goddess.

Anyway, the detail of her drawings, including the vampire cat people that I will have to share with you all one day, is amazing to me. One of the things she most seems to like drawing, though, is food (ironic, given how picky an eater she is). Given that I have a headache right now and have to do a phone meeting later, I’m going to pass on heavy thinking or attempts to be fantastically witty today and just skip to the cute:

But she’s not just a foodie illustrator. So here are a few more that aren’t food focused (though she still slips edibles in there, doesn’t she?) before I let you go back to your real life…

All In the Presentation

So, I try to occasionally go that extra mile so that my daughter can get some kind of tangible evidence I love her, since I don’t know if the mere expression of love through kind behaviors, hugs and tucking her in every night is quite enough for her. One day in fall 2011, she was being a bit persnickety about eating lunch, so I tried to dial into creative skills other than my writing and editing skills, since I was pretty sure a well-worded note about eating lunch wasn’t gonna cut it.

So, I made her this lunch:

That, folks, is a hamicorn, and a tasty example of the species, I’m sure. A body and head of ham, with horn and tail of carrot julienne, legs of dill pickle and eyes of blackberry, traipsing under a full moon of ranch dressing across a field of pretzel sticks and blackberries (those ones aren’t eyes…that would just be *gross*…as well as suggest the hamicorn had just used its horn to pluck out the eyeballs of rival hamicorns…jeez, how do you people get such sick thoughts in your head?)

She loved this lunch. So much so that I was inspired (nay, compelled and forced, rather!) to do similar visually stunning lunches for several days thereafter, and periodically over the course of several more months. Occasionally, she remembers this meal and entices me to do something similarly ambitious again.

Sadly, though, none have matched the creativity of this effort (though copying prior meals seems not to matter to my little goddess…devouring one hamicorn to sate her divine and ravenous hunger was enough, apparently).