When I decided to be a stay-at-home dad, there were lots of things I thought about and looked forward to doing with my kids – reading books, science experiments, Legos, playing catch, building forts, blocks, tea parties, etc. The one thing I never even considered doing was arts and crafts. It just wasn’t on my radar.
Little did I realize that one of the main job descriptions of a stay-at-home parent is curator of an arts and crafts museum. With three ‘artists’ in elementary school and one in preschool, the number of pieces in our collection is truly AMAZING.
We are just a small museum with limited space. At times, I am overwhelmed at the amount of thought I must put into appraising each newly arrived piece for the collection, especially when new items arrive daily. (Harder to keep up with than laundry sometimes.) Other curators I talk to are ruthless about culling potential pieces from their collections as they come in the front door and take no prisoners, but our artists have long memories.
What Chinese New Year project? Oh, from preschool? I recycled that over five years ago! Please don’t cry – I know you’re very disappointed and that was a fun project, but we can’t keep everything.
It’s especially hard to manage the collection when I am just not an arts and crafts kind of guy (sorry SmartySusan). I try to inventory and take pictures of the pieces as they enter the museum and ‘repurpose’ them after being on display, but it’s hard to keep up with and my artists push back on their hard work being ‘repurposed.’ Consequently, I overcompensate and keep most things to avoid feeling like a heel when the inevitable tears flow over a culled piece they ask about months or years later.
I am not a fan of arts and crafts, but I understand and appreciate their value along with the joy the kids get from doing them, so I deal with it. I put up with the mess of their sometimes extended ‘work-in-process’ projects because I think it helps improve their attention spans, imaginations and creativity. They are developing the “if Dad won’t buy it for us, we’ll make it ourselves mentality,” which is fun to watch in action. (Of course they want to keep all their homemade Halloween and Christmas decorations for next year. ☺ )
Admittedly, having so many projects in process at once does not lead to a very tidy house. After feeling outside the norm about letting my kids leave an in-process mess for days for multiple projects, the New York Times ran a story that made me feel a little better.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/its-not-mess-its-creativity.html?_r=0
How do you handle your curator duties? And how do you handle their projects that take days to complete? Do you let them work on multiple projects at once? Or one at a time?
4 comments
After temporary display on the fridge, we have a tall chest of drawers with one drawer per boy. The good stuff (my opinion) or stuff they care about goes in their drawer. My thought was that when the drawer got full I would thin out, but so far I just find a way to cram more in! The only things not allowed in the drawer are artwork containing food items or anything otherwise likely to disintigrate. I did have one of my oldest son’s drawings professionally framed and everyone says they can’t believe a 4th grader created it. Maybe they’re humoring his biased mother but I don’t think so. 🙂 I still can’t believe how much I spent on that frame! But, it is worth it to see how proud he is when people complement his work.
I get busted ALL THE TIME recycling our art projects! I kindly let them know that our house would look like the house of hoarding if I kept all of their masterpieces!
We do not display much at home, but I do have two plastic bins that I have all their “good” stuff in from preschool up till now, my goal is to finally go through them and sort them out by boy and year and then file them in a art file that I bought for each child and then give it to them later in life, but for now it is all in a plastic storage tub.
I love arts and craft! L-O-V-E. The reason is that at work, I don’t do or make anything – I push paper. So actually making something is therapeutic. And I love the purity of kid art. Clay is an abstract kind of a guy and Ella James is a portrait/still life artist. We made a gallery of our kids’ art in our bonus room. Framed about 30 or so in white frames – painted many frames we already had white. Don’t’ hate…