threading beads

Ari and I were in need of a project the other night (Perry was cleaning the kitchen and my aching hips needed to have a rest,) and I pulled out some unfinished wooden beads from the back room that I bought awhile ago. We set to painting them with watercolour paint, a task Ari loved, attempting to cover every last bit of every bead with paint. The pictures of the painting turned out too dark to post, but imagine deep concentration and a furrowed brow and a paint shirt and you'll have it.
We left some unpainted - or rather I hid some unpainted ones from the overzealous painterboy- and rubbed beeswax polish on once they had dried. They are such pretty shades, and the watercolour paint highlighted the grain of the wood much more nicely than paint would have.
And the best part is that Ari loves threading them. It was so fun to watch him with them at first- struggling so hard to figure out how to get that tapestry needle through and the bead pulled down the yarn, but so excited when he got it. Taking the beads off was just as challenging, and fun to watch. I 've been studying child development and the process of learning new things (mylination and setting down new pathways in the brain etc.) and it was fun to have a case study right there at the kitchen table.

And, just like Enki espouses, a sleep-cycle cemented these new learnings. In the morning he reached into the bead basket and threaded and unthreaded those beads without a hitch. He was rather pleased with himself sitting there beading in his dino PJ's. This feels like just the begining of this sort of focused activity for him- I can hardly hold myself back from setting up a thousand craft projects for he and I for the winter.