So there are a few things I’ve been meaning to post for awhile now. And as I sit here to do so, I realize they share a common thread: Ali is becoming quite a little artist.

Let’s begin with her recent foray into photography. As anyone who has been around us knows, daughter is quite adept at using our iPhones. She grabs them (now usually accompanied with cries of "Pictures! Please! Pictures! Please!"), unlocks the screen, scrolls through the programs to find the pictures or the apps we’ve downloaded for her to play with, and can entertain herself for quite awhile. Every so often I would find a bunch of random text in the notepad and more frequently my icons would be re-arranged. Since we’ve moved, she’s learned how to delete pictures (although its not clear she understands what she’s doing, she clicks the little trash can and then confirms the deletion) and paradoxically seems to delete ones she likes. Then, one day I discovered these:

It seems our little kid has become quite the Bourke-White, as a whole series of "Shopping Cart" pictures have appeared lately. Here’s one of my favorites (brief appearance by my foot in upper right):

Now that she can take pictures and subsequently delete them, who knows what kind of Ali art has already been lost. And yes, we let her play on the phones sometimes during long shopping trips (on long Costco runs or about the time we hit the curtain section in Ikea and she’s all played out). Which brings us to our next item of business, her easel. From Ikea. See what I did there?

Ali has loved coloring for quite awhile now, and has recently gotten very into colors. She likes to point out the colors of everything and is often more excited about the color than the item itself. We’ve been wanting to get her an art setup for awhile now (her table and chairs, previously for coloring, are now the domain of "eating" whatever she makes in her kitchen), so when we saw an inexpensive easel, we snatched one up, and she has really been loving it. Here are a few of our masterpieces:

She likes to do some side by side drawings where she takes one side and you take the other. She really likes the multicolored pacis, and Cookie Monster and Elmo are the only characters I can even remotely draw, so they tend to pop up a lot.

Well, I had to cut this post off once to head out earlier and now I’m super tired, so the rest will have to wait.