A Real Volcano

A Real Volcano

"Do you have a snack sack idea?"

He thought for a few beats, then said, "A real volcano."

I shot him a disapproving look and said, "I've already done a volcano." In fact, I had done a couple of volcanoes.

"I mean a real volcano." I wasn't sure what that meant but figured I'd let him show me. I ran a search and handed him my iPhone. He searched for a long time before he picked this stormy scene.

The scene is an amazing picture with a dark gray and purple sky dominating it. The mountains and water are nearly black in darkness. The lightning shines bright blue and hot white, lighting up the surrounding areas. Lava explodes from the erupting volcano adding orange and red hues to the turbulent cloud cover. "I can try but it won't look the same as the picture," I let him know.

"Just do your best." That's what I did, trying to find ways of capturing the essence of the scene as best I could with only the Sharpie. "Dad, it doesn't really look like it," he informed me when I was done.

"I told you," I said a little hurt by his flat tone.

"I know. I like it anyway though," he said in response.

Let's Do Another Volcano...

Let's Do Another Volcano...

"Why not do an Inca Kola bottle?" he asked me, staring at a 2-liter Inca Kola bottle on the kitchen counter. I had found a store recently that sold the national drink of Peru and took the opportunity to buy this rare treat for myself. Before I could even respond, he said, "Just kidding. Let's do another volcano."

I figured it was okay to do another volcano but I wondered if he's just stuck in a rut. "Are you out of ideas? Is that why you keep picking stuff we've already done?" I asked him sincerely.

"Yeah, I'm out of ideas," he admitted.

"Oh, well, ideas are easy. We can always come up with new ideas. We could pick categories like plants or animals or places or..."

He interrupted me, "Oh! Next time we can do Hawaii."

Okay that worked, I thought to myself. Looks like I'll need to work on giving him more fodder in the mornings. For today, though, we decided to stick with "another volcano."

After I finished, I wondered out loud, "This looks like the first volcano I did for you."

"But it's not right?"

"Actually I'm not sure." I wasn't. "It might be." It wasn't. But it was remarkably similar.

"I love the volcano, Dad!" he said bursting with joy.

"I didn't put your name on it because I didn't know if you wanted to."

"I wanted to!" he confirmed with gusto.

As he added his letters, he talked aloud again. "The 'i' is steaming...look!" he told me. "The 'R' is always sneaky, so he has to be sneaky," he added.

It's always cute to watch him take so much pride in his additions. He really does get into it.

T-Rex

T-Rex

"What's for the snack sack today?" I asked him as I do each morning.

"T-Rex."

"Oh, we've never done T-Rex."

"I want it to be scary," he added. We settled on this one for its sharp teeth.

He took the Sharpie again today adding in much of the dinosaur skin detail, the volcanos, and his letters. Once again, the R was sneaky and found a hiding spot among the stripes on its tail.

"I wonder what Lucas is going to say today. He always says 'Awesome! How did your dad do that?'"

"What do you say to that?"

"I don't say anything because he won't believe it."

How about my letters coming out of a volcano...

How about my letters coming out of a volcano...

Now this one was fun to draw! It was only a matter of time before he asked me for a volcano. If you ask him to draw something, 9 times out of 10, he'll draw a volcano. His don't look like this one, but that's what Google Image search is for. I'm starting to feel a little guilty about borrowing good drawings, but I can't draw from memory, so I need a reference of some sort. I've found that searching for a "drawing" helps me find something with the right amount of fidelity for drawing with a Sharpie on a paper sack. I love that his name is exploding out of the volcano. Fun, indeed!