Owen & Coloring

Owen has never really been all that interested in coloring. Sometimes he asks to do it but even then he doesn't do it for long. His pictures are almost always scribbles on the page with only one color. He makes no attempt to stay in the lines. I've tried showing him how he can turn a plain white page into something really colorful and pretty but he just doesn't care. And frankly, neither do I. If he's not interested I'm not pushing it.

Last week Owen received some early birthday presents from his Great-Aunt Judy. We wrote her a thank you note and I told Owen it would be really nice of him to color her a picture to show her his appreciate for the nice gifts. He agreed to do it and took the project seriously. He used several different colors and while he still made no effort to stay in the lines he was very intentional about coloring each object on the page. If you look in the photo you'll notice that he colored the trunk of the tree blue, the apples another color and the flowers another color. While this may look like scribbling to everyone else, his Mama think it's a piece of art! This is huge improvement! And he did it on his own without any prompting or direction from me. He was VERY proud of his picture and SUPER excited to put it in the mail for Aunt Judy. I almost didn't want to send it because it's by far the best picture he's ever colored. I wanted to put it in my journal but thought it best to send it on since Judy was the reason Owen worked so hard on it. Instead, I took this picture to put in my journal.

And as I write Owen is pulling out his crayons and coloring books to work on another piece of art. He might just learn to enjoy coloring after all!