One night last week, Reid was having me draw on the easel. This is a favourite pastime of Reid’s and I go along with it sometimes. I prefer to watch her draw as she brings such passion to the activity, often talking and even singing and dancing as she draws. Reid likes to be the art director as well as the artist, though, and boy can she direct! So, as I started to say, I was drawing the people and things as Reid asked me to do. It was going well until I got to the Daddy stickperson. He was walking along in his yellow gloriousness and so I drew one eye in the centre of the circle and added a nose to the appropriate curve. And Reid started to cry and yell. She didn’t care for my explanation of how people, even stickpeople, need to look where they are walking. I added a bright red tongue waggling, to capture a favourite trick of Daddy’s. It made her even less happy, maybe because it looked like he was bleeding from the mouth. (I never claimed to be an artist.) Next time, I will draw both eyes, the nose and the mouth in their appropriate places in the oval. My grade eight art teacher will be disappointed that my art shows such little sophistication, but if it makes Reid happy, I’m good with that.