Proud Mar---la

(ok bit of a play-on-words there, being as the real song title is "Proud Mary" but envision me belting it out just like Tina Turner....and having her legs. )

Yes indeed, we ARE proud. My eldest son Aren, who inherited the artistic gene, has just SOLD OUT his show in Vancouver this Friday.

Now, how cool is that. And, yes, I am biased, but this young man's talent was evident from an early age when at 2.5 years he drew an amazing picture of me, his father and his new baby brother - along with a duck (artistic symbolism, fer shure). Being as my boy is now 34 years old, I have lost the original somewhere in the mists of time....well, that and 22 + or - moves.

Let me try to describe this awesome early work.

He had drawn, in black marker mind, three circles with eyes etc., representing his dad and me and him in the middle of the paper. Now that sounds pretty typical of a young child, but Aren had astounding detail included wherein he had drawn a circle around his dad's mouth to represent Carl's beard. I had circles around my eyes for glasses. Then around us all was another circle with a line leading up to the right hand corner where he drew another smaller circle to indicate his brother and he had a tuft of hair on his head just like Shaun really did. I think he wanted to say that he understood this new being was part of the family but he was reserving judgement on the inclusion to the inner circle for a while. (I would like to state that Aren and Shaun are the closest of brothers to this day, so I guess the reservations went by the wayside)

And down in the lower right hand corner was this odd shape that made me ask Aren, "What's this, honey?" And he replied, "A duck."

I thought it so fine that I used it as our Christmas card for that year.

Yeah pretty sweet.

So I'm basking in a great feeling of 'proud mother' right now - a sweet sweet feeling when our progeny do something over and above the usual 'we love you no matter what'.

It's also cool to think of the artistic thread that weaves through the generations.

The painting is: 'Mother Roulin with her Baby' by V. Van Gogh ......makes me think of Aren when he first arrived in my life. And that was a pretty stellar moment too.