Marvin the Martian

"What should we do today?"

"Can you help me pick again?" he asked. Yesterday, before we settled in on drawing Sylvester the Cat, I had helped him break out of his block.

"Yesterday, we said we'd do something else from Looney Tunes."

"Oh, yeah," he said flatly. He couldn't remember what.

"We said we'd do Marvin the Martian," I reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. Let's do Marvin the Martian."

He searched for a very long time again. It's frustrating when he does that because it gives me less time to do the work. In his defense, there actually weren't too many options and they all looked similar. I could tell he was trying to find something better.

"Pick something, please," I said, doing a better job today keeping my irritation with the delay to a minimum.

"They all look kind of like this so you can just do this one."

I added the landscape just to give Marvin some placement. Had we had more time, I would have left that for Victor to add, just like he had done yesterday. If only he had picked more quickly, this would have been another collaborative effort.

Toy Story Space Alien

I asked him several times about today's snack sack and he ignored me. I walked up to him and asked him very directly, "You're not going to pick anything?"

"No," he replied, "you pick."

He sounded pretty resolute so I didn't press him to brainstorm. I bet he's sore because he's been in trouble lately. In fact, he's grounded indefinitely until he shows that he can be more responsible and mature. He's actually a really good kid, but knows how to push our buttons and has been taking it a bit too far this past week.

I decided to do something from Toy Story because he had a Toy Story theme day at his summer program today. After browsing through lots of options, I decided to do the space alien trio who say, "You have saved our lives. We are eternally grateful." I ran out of time though and could only draw one of them.

"I want to see! Which one did you do?"

Ah, so he does care! I thought.

"Ah! He-he," he laughed. "Cool!"