Respect for the Aged Day

As a grandfather I received my copy of the greeting card above. How thrilling to see such careful portraits. Mabel did this work in kindergarten, signing her name in upper and lower case in English and signing it again in Japanese. Mabel's card celebrates Respect for the Aged Day. This is a Japanese holiday, she explained to me, celebrated on September 21, which is today. So I am proud and pleased to display the Respect for the Aged Day bilingual card I received.

Painting Shirt

Mabel greeted me in her painting shirt (again) when I came in the door on Sunday afternoon. That was a happy sight. Below, she prepares one of the tiny foam paintbrushes that she favored today.

Last weekend we gave baths to some of the plastic animals living on a high ledge in Mabel's room. This week we brought down the elephant, the multi-colored horse, and Gumby & Pokey. They took turns letting us make paintings of them. This week Mabel wanted to work together on one single painting at a time, rather than each of us doing our separate paintings as we have mostly done in the past.

Superheroes

Felt-pen superheroes are taped to Mabel's closet door at her own eye level. Under the gazes of these totem-figures on Sunday afternoon we played an indoor game called "construction site" which Mabel understood much better than I did.

One part of "construction site" included winning "points" that would then be scored on the number-puzzle board by inserting a different number for each point. "How do you get points?" I asked. "You do good work." "What if I can't do good work?" "You can get points for trying."

Mabel Magazine

There was a happy Father's Day party yesterday at Mabel's house where I received two major gifts that I am installing this morning in the places where they will live.

Above on my desk blotter accompanied by local dragons are two views of the object Mabel made for me. It is MABEL MAGAZINE, with many pictures on the inside. The two pages visible are drawings named Daddy-Long-Leg and Falling-Zig-Zag.

And the other present (below) was a hummingbird feeder for outside the window of the new library. I mixed the nectar and hung it up just now.

World's Worst Library

One of the paper files that recently traveled (in consequence of retirement) from work to home contained drawings made by my daughter when she went with me as a child to the university library where I was employed for so many years. We both considered the drawing above to be a masterpiece. Both it and the drawing below date from those early days (probably the 1980s) but the frog-and-fish fable was not  made by my daughter. It was my own contribution to some forgotten quasi-competitive drawing-game we would have been playing back then.

Eighties Treat

My daughter made this thank-you card in the early 1980s. She had three great-aunts who lived together in a nearby house and sometimes took her out for treats. For every treat there would follow a thank-you note, usually illustrated.

Blue Balloons

Mabel got me up on the step-stool to try and take a picture of the entirety of her blanket/marbles structure. At the end of that effort, as above, she elected to insert herself into one of the elevated photos.

Half a minute later (with me still up on the step-stool, still pointing downwards with the camera) the child's interest had shifted to the half dozen blue helium balloons bouncing off the ceiling. Her initial efforts to pull the whole bunch down were thus recorded from on high also.

In the photo immediately above Mabel is holding the blue and green cardboard contrivance we attached to the ribbons of the balloons as a weight. Mabel drew (with a little help) a life-sized red Lego person on a piece of paper and cut the figure out and taped it to the cardboard, to be a passenger. At first we tried to use a real Lego person as a passenger, but it was too heavy. So Mabel decided to make a lightweight paper replica.

Close-up of passenger –

Symmetrical Marbles

When I came over on Sunday afternoon, Mabel and her mother were already deep into a marble game on the surface of the striped baby blanket Grandma knitted when Mabel was born.

Mabel positioned herself behind double ranks of wooden marbles while I took Mamma's place behind matching rows of glass marbles.

Mabel never fully explained the rules to me, but the two sides definitely were always made to stay like mirror-images of one another, symmetrical.

I promised Mabel a photo of the entire blanket (including the cork-sentinels on the four corners) but the two pictures below are the best ones I managed, even though they do not quite meet specifications.

At a certain point, Mabel decided to add to the game by jumping over the blanket, back and forth, back and forth. And that is how this episode ends, with the happy jumping.

Pink Blob

Mabel painted a pink blob on purple paper and then decided to cut out the shape she had made while the paper was still damp.

When we had finished painting for the afternoon, we put Mabel's painted cut-outs alongside my painted rectangles for a group picture. Mabel did actually do some of the work on my pictures, but I did not do any of the work on her cut-outs.