Breakfast and Cartoons

I like drawing.

My kids like to eat.

So, it wasn't a huge leap for me to connect the two.

The genius of this project however, is that beyond drawing, I like to sleep.

Once the kids were old enough that I could trust them to eat unsupervised, I started sketching some of their favorite cartoon characters on post-it notes. I picked ones which each of them individually liked more than the other, so there would be no confusion. I then stuck them to Correlle lids and filled two bowls with some of their favorite cereal. Place a cup of milk for each of them in the fridge, and I found myself an extra half hour of sleep.

The early ones were simple pencil sketches with a single highlight color.

I branched out a bit in the next ones, adding more color, perhaps refining the lines with ink, but the trick was to really leave the process organic, as the original idea was to give myself a little bit of a break.

The Cats in the Cradle

I grew up in a house of song. My parents would sing to me and my brothers. We sang at family reunions. We sang at church. We sang in the shower, and yes, we even sang on car trips.

When it comes to the most memorable songs from my childhood though, they are all sung in my dad's voice.

Songs from his youth at summer camp. Songs by classic rockers and singer-songwriters. Songs straight from the hymnals. And of course, among those songs was Harry Chapin's classic "Cats in the Cradle". It's a song that I cherished as a kid, because what good father's son doesn't want to "be like him"?

Stuff My Wife Says VII

"Who wants to do something gross? You get to play with water!"


I never would have thought of this, but leave it to my wife to get creative in the parenting department. We were at that point where we absolutely had to clean out the fridge. New products were moving in, old stuff had to go. Of course, there are expired salad dressings and nearly empty salsa jars, and all of it has to get cleaned out so we can be a responsible 21st century family and recycle the bottles.