Trying to keep it positive

Yesterday was a long, long day.  Not a bad day, really but way longer than it needed to be.  There was drama at work (cranky colleagues with a screw the rest of you attitude).  There were injuries.  My very, very dramatic son hurt his finger and really wanted a lot of attention for it.  (Watch, he’ll wake up and it’ll be 3 sizes bigger, purple, and clearly seriously hurt and I’ll feel like a heel.)  Then there was that quintessential mothering moment of staying up late doing something for your child that they should have done on their own but damn it there isn’t enough time and they need the sleep more than you do.

Still, I’m pretty damn proud of my daughter.

Our school does something called Town for the 5th graders.  They get to earn money in their classrooms (fake money, of course).  They get the opportunity to create a Town business if they want to.  My daughter and two of her friends created a bookshop.  They are making journals and selling them.  Ruthie wanted to make comic books and sell them too.  All the other kids get to come and buy the wares of the Town businesses.  Ruth has been addicted to comic books like Garfield and the like.  The amazing thing is that she learned a LOT from reading them.

She drew up her cartoons but in typical Ruth fashion, she eschewed the idea of using pre-printed layouts for her comics, did them on binder paper with her own lines drawn and the like.  Now, to be honest, I love what she came up with but it was messy and hard to read and full of eraser marks and misspellings.  Soooooo, I needed to come up with a solution that helped her do something that looked better but didn’t say, “Wow, honey, all that hard work you did . . . just not good enough!”  I know that kids like Technology best — whatever it is if you tell a kid they can do it on the computer, dang, they are all over it.  So, I went to a site I’d played with a year ago called Toondoo.  And, we had a solution.

Here is Ruth’s first comic strip.  I LOVE it.

Ruth

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