Heart Art Is Harder Than It Ought To Be

From Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heart!.jpg

In an attempt to commemorate a holiday and introduce art curriculum more complex than "Draw something!" I found a simple-looking exercise on Pinterest of drawing a heart, drawing a grid around and through the heart, with bending the grid lines in the heart, then coloring them in a checkerboard pattern to make the heart look dimensional. 
 
Getting this to work is harder than it looks. It's clear the creator paid attention to exactly where lines intersected each other in ways that weren't explained in the short instructions. On my third try I got kind of close. My kid expressed mild annoyance that mine looked better than theirs, which gave me a chance to point out that I am old and have looked at more optical illusions than they have. 

But drawing good checkerboard hearts was never my main goal. There was a bunch of other stuff going on that tells me homeschooling is an improvement over public school.

• My teen showed no stress earlier while I was getting out supplies and putting my laptop on the table.
• My teen showed no stress about being invited to try to imitate something Mom saw on Pinterest.
• We sat together and companionably worked on the same task.
• Neither of us got stressed when the teen said the task wasn't working for them and they were going to doodle.
• My teen felt free to tell me she was done and leave.
  
• I wasn't stressed at hearing that.
• With no stress, we talked about and agreed to throw out the papers we'd been working on.

Since pulling our kid from public school I have been working very hard and very thoughtfully to get rid of the stress responses school had trained in. 

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've blogged about our homeschooling. Since October 2022 our teen has been DMing a homebrew D&D game for my husband and I in addition to the two D&D campaigns she's been playing in since before then. D&D has a ton of educational benefits.

Since November 2022 the teen has lit a fire in the fireplace almost daily, lit candles, chipped apart melted wax, and done some (but not all) of the steps of making new candles. Given how badly most relaxation exercises (and related) worked for this kid, I am DELIGHTED they are spending daily time gazing at flames. That is a solid mental health practice. Also I refraining from talking much about how it's a legitimate mindfulness practice because I want my kid to do the practice rather than feel like they're meeting an external expectation.
 
And my kid continues to pick up a ton of facts and concepts in multiple academic areas from YouTube. This has been going on since toddlerhood. While that's good on its own, it made some public school classes extra hard because they already knew most of what was taught. 

I forget when we started her in singing lessons, but that's going well now. School had been so rough that starting to work with one new (carefully vetted and wonderful) teacher was rocky.
 
One day I will be a blogger who regularly writes strong concluding paragraphs that tie together all the themes brought up in the post. Today is not that day.