More Than a Little

What an exciting day!  My daughter has a twin sister that I had never met!  May I introduce you to my newly discovered other daughter, Chella Mademoiselle? (That’s her full name, according to Evelyn. I was apparently very out of it the day she they were born because not only did I block out the memory of that second child, I went completely insane and named her Chella Mademoiselle.)

Chella Mademoiselle was created on a whim today, when Evie decided she wanted to write on the big brown paper. We have previously had good results from big drawings like this, when she is so inclined, so I taped it to the kitchen floor and had her lay down on it.  I traced around her–in pencil–and then outlined it all with a permanent market when I finished. It is not as easy to trace an entire child as one might think, by the way, especially if one is no good at drawing.  Her head has serious problems but it looks a lot better than it did when I first started drawing, I can tell you that much.

Here we have the artist, hard at work.  I used the permanent marker to add some basic details like clothes, shoes, ruffles and a flower on the shirt and polka dots on the shorts.  Evie made the decisions about what I was drawing, though.  I have found that she isn’t really comfortable with filling in so much of a drawing without some basic guidelines. To be honest, she’s not a huge fan of coloring, although she says that she likes to color.  She bores with it easily and would generally rather be drawing or practicing her writing.

We worked on it before lunch and then finished it this afternoon. When she was done, I cut her out carefully, only severing one arm in the process.  Ooops!  That’s why she has a band-aid on her arm in the first picture, by the way, and why Evie is comparing her own band-aids to her twin’s. We used that poster-hanging putty to hang her to the wall behind her play table in the living room so they can play together. :)

I really love that picture. It was a fun project. She was pretty excited about it, and thrilled to show her daddy when he got home. I think that she would have enjoyed it more if she did like to color more.  It kept both of us entertained for a good while, though I had envisioned it requiring a little less attention from me.  Poor E, though, thought about her imaginary twin all day and then cried to her daddy at bedtime about how she wanted that girl to be a real girl, who would do everything with her, like play together and skip stones together and have lunch together and go to gymnastics together and apparently, Chella Mademoiselle would do everything Evelyn told her to.  From my experience with siblings, I fear she would be pretty disappointed by a real Chella Mademoiselle, don’t you think?