Look at the dog you drew...or maybe its an elephant?

Sometimes my kids must think I don’t have a clue. I’m sure it’s the same story for many moms and dads.

We’ve all been there. Our child brings home a picture or craft from daycare or school. We gush over it in flowery, descriptive terms, marveling in its beauty.

“I love it.”

“This is the nicest thing you’ve ever made.”

“Wow, you made this all by yourself?”

When really all of the praise boils down to the same thing – most of the time we don’t have a clue what we’re looking at.

Dog or cow? Flower or boat? It gets easier to make the distinction as they get older, but until then we start out (hoping they’ll end our sentence) with, “Look at this, you made a…..,” which only works if you get your sentence out before they get out theirs: “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes, it’s a……” (Again, help me here kid.)

Sometimes I’ll just take a wild guess. Like the time my youngest son brought home a Christmas ornament. It was shaped like an upside-down J and made out of red and green pipe cleaners with a brown one twisted on top.

“Wow, look at this!” I exclaimed. “It’s the profile of a reindeer”

“Actually,” my oldest son pointed out, “it’s a candy cane.” The brown pipe cleaner at the top was how we’d secure it to the branch.

Ah yes, that makes more sense.

Another time I was looking at a picture from pre-school, and while being all gushy said, “This is so nice. What pretty colours. Did you show your dad?”

“Mom,” came the voice of clarity, “That’s just some paint I got on the back. You’re holding it backwards.”

Oops, my mistake…again.

Don’t get me wrong. I love these creations, proven by the fact I don’t think I’ve thrown one out in seven years. And the picture my son drew of our cat has been hanging on our fridge since he was in Grade Primary. He’ll be in Grade 5 in the fall.

Still, I have my limits, and it seems like lately a lot of what was coming home wasn’t their creations, but someone else’s. Near as I can tell laminated calendar photos from 37 years ago that really have no place in our home. In mid-June I saw what I thought to be one of these ‘things’ rolled up and sticking out of one of their school backpacks.

I couldn’t help myself. Will you please, I told them, stop bringing these things home. We don’t have any place to hang them. And on and on I went until my older son butted in and said, “Mom, that’s Justin’s mural.”

So it was, a beautiful farm scene in which he had painted the sky and the grass and glued on other shapes.

“It’s lovely. I love it. This is wonderful,” I gushed.

No really, I meant it.

I hope he believed me.