Our grandson of five and a half years old is staying with us this week, and several aspects of that experience have been of interest. One of the biggest surprises has been the response of friends, in my facebook feed, ranging from surprise to sympathy or even commiseration. I have been asked how we are surviving the ordeal. I have to admit that I would not want the situation to continue indefinitely (five days is quite enough) but that is not because life with a child is any particular burden but because I have had to set aside temporarily several other things I would normally do.
The common assumption that it is necessary to “entertain” children does seem to be rather wide of the mark. They are quite capable of entertaining themselves for quite long periods of time. It is interesting to discover the extent to which kids can be involved in tasks that have to take place anyway. A good part of today has been spent in picking blackberries and bilberries out in the country, but that is an activity we would do anyway. (We might not have ended the expedition with a celebratory ice-cream had we been unaccompanied.)
A valuable discovery has been that it is possible to do, in the company of a child, things you might want to do but perhaps felt are not very grown-up things to do. They provide a great excuse. For some time I have suspected that we have hedgehogs in the garden, but never got round to making any attempt to verify this. Having a little one around has provided a wonderful excuse for devising an experiment to see if this is indeed the case. (It involved a sheet of board, covered in a thin sprinkling of flour around a food source and water supply, to see what marks were left behind by whatever came to eat and drink.) The experiment was not 100% convincing, but I’m encouraged to think about it further.
My art work has actually been provided with an excuse to “play” with a new medium–mono-prints. I was introduced to this technique at the regular life-drawing class I attend, and wanted a good excuse to explore it further. I have to admit that I would probably not have opted to draw dinosaurs, left to myself, but I have welcomed the opportunity to explore some additional technical aspects of the process, particularly different kinds of mark-making, under the pretext of “entertaining” my grandson.
OK: I will not be very reluctant to take him back to his parents tomorrow afternoon, but all those people who have been feeling sorry for us, or who have expressed surprise at our capacity for survival, need to take a reality check.