Window Math

On Sunday afternoon Mabel remembered the glass markers she had used at my house in the past. We dug them out and a few of them still worked. The windows above are along the west wall of the kitchen, which becomes the arts and crafts laboratory when Mabel is here. Once we had working window markers, Mabel decided to give me a math lesson. She stood on the kitchen step-stool and assigned herself the right-hand panel while I got the left-hand panel.

Mabel used a tablespoon measure ("big cup") and a teaspoon measure ("small cup") as receptacles for pennies. On her panel I wrote the words at the top because she couldn't reach that high, but she wrote the numerals and the lower-down words herself, and drew the dividing lines very decisively. She showed that her big cup with 4 pennies and her small cup with 1 penny made total cup of 5 pennies. Then, under Mabel's direction, I wrote on my left-hand panel that the 3 pennies she had arranged in my big cup and the 2 pennies she had arranged in my small cup ALSO made total cup of 5 pennies.

We did a little more drawing on the windows after the math lesson was over, but window-drawing was really just an interlude to warm up for the major yellow banner. Which Mabel laid out, directed, and embellished with great persistence and joy.

Dinner Table Disappearance

When you are four you sit at the table in a full size chair and eat food with metal utensils and drink milk from a glass made of real glass. Four-year-old Mabel's new mealtime drinking glass has an extra heavy bottom to encourage its own stability. She spilled nothing – not one drop – when I came over on Saturday to share her evening while her parents went out to dinner in the Mission for Daddy's birthday.

Mabel told me her memories of the vacation in Portland this summer when she rode on a ferry boat to get to a zoo where there was a real train that she also rode. She thinks that BART (like we have here) is sort of like a train but the train in Portland was really a real train.

And then she slowly disappeared down to the land underneath the table and became a worm going underground and wriggling secretly through the earth and then popping up right next to her unsuspecting grandfather on the other side of the table and scaring the bejeezus out of him.

Red Road

After we arranged a big sheet of paper on the kitchen floor and set out all the supplies we could find, Mabel worked on this painting in several stages, using brushes and markers and finger paint. It started out as blobs of color, different blobs made in different ways. Then these blobs little by little came to be connected by a wide red road.

Glass

Mabel liked the idea of the washable glass markers I found at Flax. I gave  her the step-stool to boost herself up. She used the tray marked THIS IS NOT A STEP to spread out her selection of markers.

The tray marked THIS IS NOT A STEP intrigued Mabel. She asked more than once if I was sure that you could NEVER use it for a step, not even for a minute?

The work on the kitchen windows could only be photographed later, when evening light made Mabel's work more visible.

We played a window-pane version of tic-tac-toe. And collaborated on cartoon-y faces. All the swirls, however, came exclusively from Mabel's  hand.

Kitchen Art

Mabel spent the morning at Spencer Alley while her parents back at home rearranged all the furniture and possessions in their apartment as a result of the creation of a real bedroom for Mabel, with walls and a window and a clothes closet and a bookcase and a toy chest and many more features, plus its own solid door. The parents could do their heavy lifting more easily with Mabel off site, so she came on the train with me early in the morning and we immediately threw ourselves into setting out art supplies and using them.

The Alley

There are many obscure alleys in the Mission.

Spencer is one of them.

It dead ends after only half a block of existence.

Trucks are advised not to enter the alley.

When they do, they are soon sorry.

The Mission has a sunny climate, compared to the more ocean-exposed parts of the city.

The alley in its sheltered isolation must be one of the warmest spots in the Mission.