To something brighter.
The place is a veritable disaster wrought of creative play. My desk is stacked with dozens of drawings all done in the last 24 hours. Modeling clay creatures made this afternoon. Ink stamps and pads lay all over H.o.p.’s computer keyboard. He was painting this afternoon too and his paints are out. Last year he made a papier mache dragon head (I helped a good bit but he drew the model) which he started to color but never finished it. I knew he’d probably one day want to finish it and after leaving it out for months I put it in the back room. Early this evening he started hunting for the dragon head, where was it. I brought it out for him and he painted it blue. Ready by now. I don’t know why now and not before but I knew he would get around to it one day which was why I’d saved it. He comes running in with 12 pens in his right hand and a three inch stack of paper in his left and sits down before the computer and pushes the ink pads and stamps off and puts his pens on the pad and starts drawing again. Blocks lie strewn all over the floor from things he was building and crashing earlier. A mask he made yesterday lies on the floor in the middle of the blocks. And one of his toy robots. There are cotton balls and felt everywhere from transient puppets, stryofoam balls with ink eyes drawn on them litter the floor, cut-up pipe cleaners out of which he made a small forest, sticking them in another block of styrofoam and parachuting a toy man on it that he got the other day at a birthday party. Play doh and modeling clay everywhere, the rugs, the futon. Cut-outs also of more dinosaurs he’s drawn in the past couple of days
Neopets can get sick. You go back to visit your Neopet on the computer and somehow it is sick. H.o.p.’s was sick and he isn’t a maniac about playing the games, he likes to draw the Neopets, so he has no points. He doesn’t worry about points for food because you can get free soup if you don’t have many points. He gathered enough points to build his Neopet a twig house and he was satisfied with that. Then the Neopet was sick and needed, the game said, “medicinal soap”. He had 200 Neopet points. There was no medicinal soap at the Neopet pharmacy to buy and H.o.p. was greatly concerned, had to make his Neopet well. I went to the Shop Wizard and found where “medicinal soap” was being sold. The bars ranged in cost from 9,000 to 13,000 points. And H.o.p. with only 200 Neopet points.
For which reason I now have a modeling clay Neopet on my desk. He made a copy of his Neopet out of modeling clay so it would be well, and now he’s not very greatly concerned with the online Neopet needing a 10,000 point bar of medicinal soap. Which is a good thing. A child in grief over an ill Neopet wouldn’t be good.
Lots of creativity charging around that seven-year-old brain.
And I need to clean up.
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