… that they wanted me to put these photos on my blog:

and to let you know, they’re not babies anymore.

Tomorrow they will be four.

Just quietly,

I think they were reminding me too.

 Ivy has loved to draw from a really young age. 

It’s one of the things I am proud to say I’ve  handed down to my kids.

My girls, anyway.

Noah hasn’t shown alot of interest in free hand.

He’s more…abstract.

This year, it has been amazing to watch Ivy’s artistic skill develop.

At the beginning of the year we were seeing alot of this kind of drawing.

A head and the curly hair (it’s always been there) and the beginnings of hands with fingers sprouting from the curls.

Note the eyelashes.

Cute.

For a while we were getting lots of spiders.

You all remember the spider, right?

Actually that spider has tears

and a rash

but I only found that out months later, when I asked her about the dots around the eyes.

I often saw them when Ivy was acutely unwell in the hospital, or just starting to get better, so one day I asked her what they were.

The value of art therapy is great.

She still draws tears (although they are evolving too)

but by the end of her hospital stays, the subjects are always smiling.

Around the middle of the year the heads started to look more like bodies and we started seeing arms, with hands and fingers…many fingers (nobody said artists were good with numbers),

little legs

and smiles, with teeth!

She was particularly switched on the day she drew the blue man

because that same day she drew this:

 When she showed me, I was blown away.

This is one of my favourite Ivy pictures.

Noah

with spikey hair

kicking a ball.

Often the drawings were accompanied with a story.

This one is of Ollie the cat.

Titled “sad Ollie”

She drew it when our cat had an abscess and was not very well.

I love it.

Ollie has ears (it was the first time she drew them)

and five legs (she’ll tell you they are four legs and a tail).

At the time, Ollie was a bit miffed with the world and was laying around alot.

She totally captured that and the bitty fur (the long stripes) and the bandaid covering the wound.

 This one was created just after an episode of Play School.

Anyone who has ever seen the Humpty Dumpty in Play School can see the likeness, right?

She’d been drawing like that for a few months

until last week, in the hospital,

when she drew this:

 Friends, we have a body!

Her talent knows no limits!

Heath is his name.

He is eternally sweet, for a four year old boy and danced with Ivy, in the kindy mosh pit.

When she refused him a fourth time because her father was buying her an ice block

he took it in his stride and moments later returned to her side

with his own water ice,

same colour

and flavour.

We chuckled.

When you order up the same iceblock, in a four year old world,

it must be love.

Noah had been watching these interactions

and we his

with an amusement and sweetness reserved for parents of sisters with brothers

or in our case

sisters with a twin brother.

Heath and Ivy were sitting

enjoying each other’s company

when the brother sidled up to his father;

“I don’t like that boy sitting so close to my sister“, he hissed in protest to the scene.

“Does Ivy have a boyfriend?” Dave asked, leaning in close to his son, merriment dancing in his eyes.

“Yes” scowled the boy.

“What’s his name?” his father asked.

“It’s Noah” he replied, arms crossed, a deep furrow on his brow

and with that he went and sat with Ivy, almost on top of her suitor.

Boyfriends beware.

When there is a brother on the lookout, you barely stand a chance!

“How beautiful is youth? How bright it gleams with it’s illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of beginnings, story without end. Each maid a heroine, each man a friend”. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The theme at I heart faces is sun flare.

Oh, how I love me some sun flare and this gorgeous girl.