Happy Birthday, Cornflower!

Six years ago (could it be that long?), our youngest blessing was given to us.

Mariel was glad to have someone small to cuddle...

Triss kept her entertained...

And she entered into all of our amusements~ in her own unique way.

She has a style all her own!

Although sometimes she feels the shoes she must fill are awfully big...

It's tiring being the youngest,

But with a smile and some pixie dust, she carries it off.

Happy Birthday, Cornflower!

We love you very much, sweetheart.

Dolls

The Headmistress has two posts on dolls, which mainly focus on whether a store-bought doll is a want or a need. It has brought to mind all the ways my girls have played with dolls.

At the age of four, Triss was given homemade paper dolls by some older homeschooled girls as a birthday present. Very sweet. The dolls were self-portraits, and as Triss loved these girls very much, she loved their paper doll counterparts as well. (Fa and Beatrice, do you remember that? She still has those dolls in a box somewhere!) Triss was not a doll-y girl, and I had always been puzzled that she did not play with her one baby doll, a gift given to her at the age of one. But now her creativity was sparked, and she began hauling large sheets of construction paper out of the art drawer. She made almost lifesize "closet dolls." These were dolls made out of a sheet of construction paper for a head, another for the body, and construction paper strips for arms and legs. She taped them to the inside of her closet and disappeared for hours, having long conversations with those dolls. For months. Even after she had moved on from those dolls, about two years later, she got very upset with me for taking them down as I prepared to move our third daughter (a newborn at the time) into the room with Triss and Mariel.

Also around this time, Mariel and Triss were given very large rag dolls bought at Eckerd. These inexpensive dolls are similar to giant Raggedy Ann's or Hollie Hobbies, but not as distinctive. They are drug store rag dolls and that is what they look like. But those two girls just love Molly and Amanda and wouldn't trade them for the world. They still use them as "extras" in their little plays, friends when they have tea, pillows for watching movies, and someone to cuddle when they are lonely.

Mariel has always been a doll girl. She loves her babies and her stuffies (still), and it doesn't matter where they came from. She has a heart for the forlorn. (This makes it very difficult to get rid of anything, lol!) She also admires her big sister, and entered into Triss' paper doll play with great enthusiasm.

Because it wasn't limited to the large closet dolls. Oh no. Soon Triss was making dolls out of anything. Notebook paper dolls were carefully torn out at church; she found the twist ties for the trash bags and twisted them into little red and green dolls; she carefully drew and cut out dolls from drawing paper; and made little teeny dollies out of gum wrappers.

Seeing her love of paper dolls, and naively assuming that she would appreciate some "real" paper dolls (looking back I wonder what could be more real than a dollie a girl makes herself?) I purchased some beautifully done Dover paper dolls, and spent hours painstakingly cutting them out, refusing to let the girls help because they might "cut wrong." I put these paper dolls in a box and offered them to the children. They enjoyed them some, but those fancy paper dolls would have to wait for Cornflower to get old enough to play with; Triss and Mariel loved their homemade dolls more.

Then they discovered Polly Pockets. Polly Pockets are wonderful dolls because they are small enough to go in a pocket (obviously), they have underwear that never comes off (yay!), and they are inexpensive. The girls had also begun clamoring for Barbies, and had been given some, but I was tired of finding the Barbies in various stages of undress all over the house. I know they're just dolls, but it seemed wrong, somehow. So I pushed the Polly Pockets, even going so far as to buy Pollies to replace Barbies if the girls would give them up.

The girls still love their Pollies. They are handy for playing with in the car, and we are in the car a lot. They do not differentiate from the Happy Meal Pollies and the storebought Pollies either, but happily play with either or both, pleased to have more people in their collection.

Cornflower joined her sisters in doll-playing by the time the girls were two, five and seven, and quite surpassed Triss and Cornflower, who are more into dolls as big people or older kids, in baby-playing. She adored her doll-babies (still does), and discovered the beautiful paper dolls around the age of four. By then I had realized that toys can't be enjoyed if they are too precious to be damaged in creative play (not that I allow the children to be destructive with their playthings, but keeping toys out of the hands of children because they might be accidentally ripped is going a little far), and I stood back and let Mariel and Cornflower play. My grandmother visited around this time, and showed the girls how she had made paper dolls during the Great Depression, by cutting models out of catalogs. She had a whole box of these paper dolls, and made up all sorts of games for them, which she described to my girls as they worked together to fit out a shoebox with people, purses and other accessories. This was priceless.

It also inspired the girls to cut out any catalogs they could find. American Girl and Vision Forum catalogs are especially useful for making paper dolls.

Triss had saved up half the money for an American Girl doll at the age of nine, and Mr. Honey and I paid the other half, as we had agreed to do previously. A couple of years later, we found a beautiful Italian-made doll at a thrift store for five dollars, and that doll shares pride of place with Triss' American Girl doll. Cornflower and Mariel each received a special baby from a wonderful little doll store last Christmas, and they have Our Generation dolls from Target that they play with. Cornflower also has an old doll from the fifties, not in the best of shape, that she fell in love with at a thrift store and bought, and this dollie sits next to her beautiful doll-store baby. Mariel and Cornflower would like American Girl dolls, but each is still deciding whether they like them enough to save half the money toward one. They got a dollhouse with doll family last year (including grandparent dolls), which Cornflower has set up in her room. She plays in there when I am doing school with her sister, and has set up a little nursery for her doll-babies as well: Triss' old doll crib, a little plastic doll high chair, and a doll stroller that she uses to push her babies all over the house and backyard. She is constantly bemoaning the lack of pretty baby doll clothes in this house, and reminds me when I enter her room to "be quiet, because my baby is sleeping."

What I have noticed in all the doll-play at our house is that anything can be a doll. The girls have used wood mulch from the playground, old socks (which also make good dresses for dolls, by the way), anything paper, even spoons. The plastic ones are especially good, because you can paint or marker faces onto them.

In the last year, they have branched out into clothespin dolls, sock dolls (sewn with needle and thread and so more sophisticated), and wire-made dolls-- a fancier twist on Triss' twist-tie fascination. The girls' older friends made them some old-fashioned clothespin dolls this past winter, and gave Triss a fairy doll making kit for her birthday, causing little fairy children to appear on books, in bowls, and hanging from light fixtures; and clothespin people to pop up in every corner of the house. If you use modern clothespins to make your dolls, you can also use them for keeping blanket-curtains up in your fort or theater, lol!

This week, they were given lots of old calendars from the same sweet friends, who continue to inspire them to greater heights of creativity and imagination. Their friends used to cut pictures out of the calendars to make cards for others, but my girls are cutting out.... dollies. :o)

Da Vinci-- Reposted

Sometimes I hit the "publish" button before I have thought through my motivations.

Two nights ago I posted a narration exchange between Mariel and myself, and then deleted it after realizing I was just venting frustration, which is not something I really like to do on my blog. So I deleted the post, but someone noticed and asked where it went. ::blush::

I wonder if I was being revisionist in deleting it, but my initial thought is that it is not revisionist when the deletion occurs as a result of the realization that one's motivations are not of the sort one wishes to act on where one's blog is concerned. But it is revising, nonetheless, so I suppose technically it is revisionist history. Oh well. I still stand by the deletion.

However, there are lessons to be learned in the exchange, so I will now repost it, in a slightly different format, as a lesson to myself and others on what not to do in a reading and narration. I have come to the conclusion that the question I asked was rather above the ability of the child-- too vague, as Krakovianka said. Another part of the problem with that narration exchange was that it was an exchange rather than one question posed by the teacher, and a monologue delivered by the student, however short. I kept pestering her with questions after she was not able to answer the initial one, thereby frustrating the child and myself simultaneously.

My responses and additional questions are in the brackets. The reason I pestered her so much was because I wanted her to go beyond da Vinci's desultory habits and get to the genius of his mind. She never went there. I'm glad she understood this large flaw in da Vinci's character, but I was hoping she would be able to understand that he achieved much, in spite of it. (Think of how much he might have achieved with more discipline!)

[Describe Leonardo da Vinci’s personality. What kind of person was he?]

He was careless and very forgetful. He never finished anything.

[Never?]

Well, sometimes he finished things.

[How did he become respected and famous if he was like that?]

He painted the Mona Lisa, and that is a very famous painting, because she was very pretty. The real one is still in a French museum. He wasn’t always careless and forgetful. Sometimes he would remember to do things. One time he made a sketch of a lady, who thought he was going to do her painting, but he never did her painting. Her name was Isabella d’Este. Her husband secretly threw away the sketch because he hated it.

[Could you tell me more about his personality? Some more positive aspects? Tell me about his talent.]

Well, he had a talent for painting and inventing things, and dissecting bodies. Those are his talents.

[He doesn’t sound like a very pleasant person.]

Hey, he didn’t dissect live bodies, he dissected dead ones!

(I finally asked her what she would think of da Vinci if she had met him. She went on to tell an imaginary story of what she thought would happen if she met Leonardo da Vinci. They visit about various and sundry everyday things, he paints her portrait and they share lunch together.)
_____________________________________________________

And here is her narration on the next exam question. I think she did well, although she does get one or two things wrong:

[What are some ideas, inventions and artworks that Leonardo da Vinci came up with?]

He came up with the idea of inventing huge wings, and then falling into the sea probably. He also came up with the idea of army warships that would be able to float on a river, a sea or an ocean even. It would have a round top with holes in it that the men could shoot things or throw things out of, and the enemy had to be a really good shot if they could shoot in a hole. His famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is still in France today. Once it was bombed, but some security guards were able to save it before it was bombed. And then once, a man threw rocks at the window where it was, shattered the glass, and the painting, and got arrested. He drew many sketches of the human body, and that helped doctors figure out what was wrong with their patients. Once, he helped a king by digging a large river under an enemy kingdom, but it was never finished because the war was long over by the time they were done with just a quarter of it.