Only on the paper

One of Jonathan’s favorite things to do these days is drawing. He’s been close to picking up this skill for a while now, but he had a couple of tough hurdles to clear before he could get to the joyful coloring you see in the picture.

First, he had to conquer his uncontrollable urge to eat the crayon, rather than color with them. We tried giving him pens instead of crayons for a little while. That helped some - he couldn’t bite the tips off of pens. But we noticed the pen lines on his legs and face and decided that this wasn’t necessarily the best substitution. Then we moved to the next solution - a binky is now a required part of Jonathan’s drawing attire, just like a paint smock for a child working with paint. With a bink in his mouth, there’s no room for the crayon

Now, with intact crayons, Jonathan was raring to create. Remembering the issues we had with Mikaela drawing on any surface she could reach, we’ve been drilling Mikaela’s old mantra of “only on the paper” hard. So far, Jonathan seems to understand. He even goes and gets a piece of paper on his own when he wants to color. But we may have been going a bit overboard on the drilling. We noticed today that Jonathan now refers to any drawing instrument - pens, crayons, markers - as “paper”.