Miriam's recent artwork

We burn through scrap paper at our house. Not literally, of course, but my girls could (and do) spend hours colouring every day! They found some hand turkeys they made last year and having been drawing dozens of hand turkeys since. Here's one of Miriam's, with a sun in each corner:

Here's the paper Miriam used to practice writing her name. Around the middle of the page you can see a decent MIR. 

She knows how to write all the letters of her name but getting them all down on the same piece of paper in the right order is somewhat of a challenge. On her chore chart she asked me to dictate her name so she could copy it down. "M" I said, and she wrote a big M. "I," I said, and she drew a big eyeball. So we stopped there and she just doodled the rest of her name. I'll have to take a picture of that later.

Here she is pointing out the neck that she drew. She was so proud of that. For about a week now she's been so frustrated at her inability to draw a human figure with a neck. "I just can't draw necks!" she'd fret. "I always just stick the head right on the clothes. Heads don't go on clothes! Heads go on necks!"

I'm glad she finally figured this out because I was getting rather sick of drawing people for her to colour (since she flat out refused to keep any of her neckless drawings and would wad them up into balls and throw them in the recycling bin). She's good to go now because she can draw necks by herself (phew)!

Here she is decorating her be-necked person:

She said she wasn't sure who it was. We decided that it was, perhaps, Joseph (and the amazing technicolour dreamcoat):

She's been drawing quite a lot of pioneer pictures recently. We're still plugging away at the Little House series. This is a picture of a couple of pioneers in a wagon full of seeds. I drew the pioneer on the left; Miriam drew the pioneer on the right (just in case you were wondering):

And here's a picture of some covered wagons that she drew. A purple and orange "pioneer wagon" is on the left, while an "ox cart" is featured in blue and green on the right:

I haven't told my girls this yet, but I was doing some family history research and came across a short history of Thomas Hancock (my girls' sixth-great grandfather) that said, "...Thomas and Amy and much of their family also moved to Far West, Missouri, arriving at Plum Creek about 20 Mar 1838." Plum Creek?! My girls are going to die of joy when they learn that their ancestors camped on the banks of Plum Creek (even if they did predate the Ingalls family by at least thirty years and were at Plum Creek, Missouri, while the Ingalls were at Plum Creek, Minnesota). 

When I told Andrew this he said, "Plum Creek is a real place?"

"Well, it's Laura's life story," I pointed out.

"Good point," he said.