June 2 - Superhero Drawing Studio

Today for Superhero Drawing Studio, Zephyr wanted to make his own Pokémon cards... well, his own brand of Pokémon called Z-Me. Sounded good! I sized out the frames for him (so that when we cut them out they would fit in his new binder) and let him go to town. 

Lyric wanted me to make a picture of Batman, Robin, and Stripe man for him to color. And he wanted a giant Stripe robot behind Stripe Man. 

Work in progress.

While I was doing it, Lyric saw what Zephyr was doing and started to make up his own cards. Hey, why not?

I'm going to give myself an incomplete on this one. I got to show them how I draw a stick figure out of circles and lines and let them work on their own cards, but I feel like I started too late. We had to stop just when we were really starting to roll. 

May 9 - Superhero Adventure

HYPOTHESIS: you can teach cooperative play through running certain scenarios with your kids. 

PROCEDURE: For Superhero adventure this month I was thinking we might have our homemade costumes ready, but the sewing still has to be done. So we just went forward with what we had, and Lyric wanted to be Robin while Zephyr made up the mysterious Mister Y. I wanted to tell Zephyr that Mister E might be a better way to hit that pun, but thought better of it... His using a Y at the end probably signifies some new level of reading understanding, why get in the way of that? 

I constructed 4 "gates" and placed them around my living room.  

Post it notes would've worked too, but tape and paper worked fine.  

The idea here was to give them various gates they'd have to cover as I called them out, and since they wouldn't be able to reach more than one on their own, I could make them work together. It would be kind of like a cooperative game of "ship to shore", where the kids would race to carry out an order but they had to work together. 

Lyric wanted to run a scenario with zombies on balloons, so I indulged him and said I was Brother Blood and I was calling in zombies from dimensional gateways. As I called out two numbers, the boys would indeed direct each other over to the right place. We'd pretend to fight off the zombies for a few seconds, then I would give them another countdaown to get to the right gate. I think 4 gates might have been too few, there were a few times I realized they could just stay at the number they were on rather than leave. Next time I'll try 8 gates. 

RESULTS: the kids did end up working together and seemed to have a great time doing it. I think the format is very promising as a Nuclear Submarine, I'm excited to try building on it.

Superhero Adventure is always popular with Lyric, it's kind of what he wishes he could be doing all the time. In giving him that, I gotta call this a success. 

May 6 - Mother's Day Crafting

I'm writing this a bit late in case my wife read it early... I didn't want to ruin the surprise. But now that Mother's Day has come and gone, let's talk about what we made! 

As you may recall, the past few days we were designing and making our own superhero costumes. Well, part of the reasoning behind that was that I wanted to let my wife know that she's my hero, and all she's doing to keep our family safe and cared for is appreciated. So I wanted to make a hero shirt for her as well. First step was designing the card: 

Longtime readers of the blog know how important swans are to us. I was pretty happy with how the Superman S could become a swan, I haven't seen that before.  

While I did that, the kids worked on their own versions of Mommy as a superhero, Zephyr using markers:​

Zephyr also drew my mom and grandma on cards we made for them. 

And Lyric worked on his with watercolors: 

That's him as Robin with Mommy as a superhero. You might have to squint to see it, but it's there.  

Then I cut out the pattern and sewed it to a shirt I got at American Apparel. 

Okay, I got help with the sewing from my grandmother... Thanks Grandma Noonie! 

I'm not expecting my wife to wear the shirt out so much, but now she can join the club and play with the kids when they put on their own superhero shirts. And isn't reinforcing the bond between a mother and her sons what Mother's Day is all about? 

The correct answer, as it turns out, is "no". Mother's Day is also about getting the moms in your life flowers. Fortunately last weekend, Zephyr found a swan vase at an estate sale he went to with his Mumsie, so we went out and got an orchid for it.  

Smooth dude.  

A fairly successful Mother's Day, I think. Hopefully the creative effort behind it makes it that much more special... 

May 5 - Superhero Costume Design

Continuing yesterday's work today, I got on starting to create the shirts we designed.

Crocodile Man! 

I kind of got caught in a hole doing Lyric's arm scales with a laundry marker... it took a long time and ending up looking a bit too subtle. I decided to switch over to sharpie for the belt. I'll probably have to sharpie the arm scales as well, I just hope that the internet is right about it being laundry-safe. I think the crocodiles came out pretty good, though! Next step is sewing on the felt.

Kind of based on the Flash, but I think it ended up looking more like Doug's friend Skeeter. Which is okay by me.  

I also made a quickie lightning T-shirt design for Lyric, since both Zephyr and I have lightning shirts and Lyric wants to join our club. If this works out I might just make more symbols from felt and apply them to shirts he already has. That may be a quick and easy way to make his wardrobe more superheroic.

I did a little work on Zephyr's design this morning as well, but that's still in development. While I was doing all of this, the kids were playing with the Pokemon stuff they made at the last cardboard toy shop. They would come over and check in on my progress every so often. It wasn't the most involving morning activity for them, but at least a) I was modeling creativity for them, and b) they were involved with something we had made in a previous morning activity. I'll take it.

May 4 - Superhero Drawing Studio

HYPOTHESIS: If we let my youngest son design his own clothes, he'll want to wear them.

Let me explain that a bit further: I have two sons who are both great, but very different from each other. Zephyr, my oldest, is a very snazzy dresser who loves to wear stylish clothes. He likes wearing a tie, for example, and he always has. Lyric, my youngest, not so much. He fights me constantly when we get dressed in the morning, refusing to wear lots of clothes we have for him (many of which are hand-me-downs from Zephyr). Where Zephyr likes fancy things, Lyric likes superhero clothing, and will (as another example) wear a mask and cape for a shockingly long period of time.

The other day as I was getting Lyric dressed in something fancy, he told me "I just don't like wearing fancy things". I asked him why not, and he said, "I don't know... I was just born that way". I'm not sure if he knew how affecting that answer was to me, but it really got me thinking. I want Lyric to be happy being who he thinks he is, and I want him to feel comfortable being the person he feels like he should be. I don't want to impose my own idea of who he should be onto him, I want him to come to be the person he feels like he's meant to be.  As a dad, of course I'm going to shape him in certain ways, but I feel like it's my job as a dad to not just raise kids to be what I want them to be, but to raise kids to be the best possible version of who they actually are. So I decided I'd try to work with him to make some new superhero clothes based on superheroes he makes up.

The first step would be to draw out the designs for the costumes, which is why I scheduled this very special episode of Superhero Drawing Studio.

PROCEDURE: We talked this morning about which made up superheroes we wanted to draw... Zephyr made up an alien named Zemore on the spot, and Lyric said he wanted to make a drawing of Crocodile man, a superhero he's made up before. I took a piece of paper and gave one to Zephyr, and drew an outline for Lyric so we could talk about how the costume would be designed.

Lyric said he wanted two crocodiles in the middle, and we looked up crocodiles on our iPad as a reference. I started sketching based on his instructions, trying to place how he wanted the crocodiles to look. He wanted two crocodiles but also wanted a symbol in the middle like Batman, so I came up with a way to make the interior circle formed by the negative space of the crocodiles:

And then from there it was about figuring out the color patterns. Again, I did the coloring here, letting Lyric act as the foreman... his drawing skill is coming along nicely, but this time I wanted to concentrate on him ideating more than using fine motor skills.

And of course while we were busy doing that, Zephyr was going to town making his drawing:

So that was phase one. Today I went to American Apparel and my local fabric store to get shirts and felt and fabric markers, and tomorrow we'll start constructing some new costumes. Stay tuned!