Bug parties.

For the last two weekends I've attended kids' birthday parties with the bug. One was at a local children's museum. We hadn't visited before and it was fun to play with costumes, bubble machines, vacuum cleaner tubes, and wind tunnels. The second was at a Boulder kids' art studio where the party guests made bugs, butterflies, tambourines, and spin art, when not fighting over the glitter, jewels, feathers, or salad spinners used to rotate the artwork.

The unsurprising observation that 3-year-olds are not rock stars at sharing led the moms present to some interesting commentary. "You've used enough glitter, honey, give someone else a turn." "One handful of jewels is enough." "Share the paints so your whole box isn't just blue." "It's time for another project. You're done with that one."

As someone who wonders where we get our internal artistic limits, it was thought-provoking to watch the moms, in trying to maintain social order, restrict their kids' artistic freedom. I think not bonking your neighbor on the head with the paintbrush is as important as the next person. It did make me wonder, though: if we'd just left the kids in the room with all the art supplies and let them go without limits, what would they have made? I can't imagine the bug getting to use ALL THE PAINT SHE WANTS on as many sheets of paper as she wants, even if there's only one quick brushstroke on each.

I also wonder if we're teaching them frugality with this approach, which is honestly important since artists work on limited budgets, or if we're keeping them from new kinds of discovery learning. Weird tensions between artistic ideals and kids making art.