Laurelines: My birthday celebration with Kate: at the museum, reading, and sketches

January 28, 2015

My birthday celebration with Kate: at the museum, reading, and sketches

When my firstborn child, my daughter Kate, was very young, I started reading to her and taking her to libraries and art museums. In fact, I started reading to her before she was six months old. I'd sit her on my lap and we'd take flight... off to the world of Good Night Moon, Beatrix Potter, Mother Goose, Eric Carle, Arnold Lobel, Kate Greenaway, A Child's Garden of Verses, and many, many more. We never looked back.

We visited London often, and also Edinburgh, where she was born. We lived in London, in fact, during her kindergarten year. And we went to art museums there, her first ones, and then everywhere we went, all the time.

Now, Kate has her own children---two little boys---and she reads to them and she and her husband take them to museums and to libraries.

And she herself still reads. In fact, she reads more than any person I know, including me, and that is saying a lot in the world we live in. And she goes to art museums. Often. As much as possible. Everywhere.

Earlier this month, it was my birthday. We celebrated it together, at the art museum, at a library. Of course, we did. Looking, reading, talking... mother and daughter.

In this sketch I made of Kate reading, she is exactly the age I am in the photo above.

As she read, I also sketched the scene behind her.

It was a wonderful birthday.

In the chilly dusk, we walked through a park, and to one of my favorite restaurants for an early dinner. Then it was home for each of us... her to her two little boys and husband, me to my husband and our dog. A day to remember, a day with a long and sweet history behind it.

Laurelines on January 28, 2015 in Books, Drawing, Family sketches, Food and Drink, Museum sketches, North Carolina Museum of Art | Permalink