Coloured thoughts

Yesterday was a Christmas fest at Chubbocks's school, with grandparents especially invited to attend. As usual Chubs insisted on wearing his uniform rather than dress up, and sure enough, when we got to school, everyone else was dressed up in red and green, and there was Chubs in his purple sweater...! I sure bought temporary peace in the morning by letting him have his way but later at school, I got an earful from him about how I had put him in his uniform. Can't win.

Of course, he did stand out from the sea of red. By the way, his new filling between his front teeth had fallen out day before when our friend butted his teak head into my parents' bed ( did I mention, the headboard has a 6 inch wide crack in it now?), so he was back to being known as hole-in-the-teeth by his friends.

Puddi had been tagged on to the jingbang since she loves going to his school. She was busy walking around the grounds with a proprietorial air as if to say, "This is my school".

After the carol singing ( cute but discordant), came the art activities - painting, colouring, making sparkly candles and such. Chubbocks picked up a lovely christmas tree to colour. He has a definite talent for art which we noticed a while back and encouraged by giving him water colour paints and crayons to work with. All the spare paper in office ( the wasted printouts etc) are commandeered by me as his art paper. Some months ago, when he was still in playschool, he had made a gorgeous painting, mixing up interesting combinations of colours and coming up with what he called 'Happy'. Yesterday, he painstaking coloured inside the lines of the christmas tree. He used some lovely colours and made sure he didn't leave any spots uncoloured, but somewhere the artist and freespirit in me was weeping when I saw how careful he was being to colour inside the lines. Even when I tried to tell him it was ok to colour anywhere he liked, he insisted that ma'am had said they were supposed to only colour inside the lines.

Part of me knows I'm overreacting and that it won't permanently kill his creativity if he learns to stick to the instructions. And a very small part of me, truly a very small part, is a little bit sad that ma'am is now his arbiter of behaviour and not mom. But mostly I'm wondering why they have to learn to colour inside the lines, and why they should get points for doing so, rather than for creativity and expressiveness and being their own, wonderfully quirky and different little selves. What do you think?

As an aside, later at home, he drew a grey-violet something which he said if you looked at right side up was a house on fire, and from the side, was a playground. So weird quirkiness seems to be alive and well.