The Evolution of Stick People

Tyler has only recently started showing an interest in drawing pictures. I'm pretty sure that it has something to do with the fact that he's been spending a lot of time at the drawing table with the older girls in his class at school. He is so proud of the stick people, houses, and trees that are a part of almost all of his "works of art." I've even noticed an occasional shopping cart and car in some of his pictures. Anyway, below is one of his more recent drawings--according to our little basketball fanatic, each stick person represents a player on the SLU Men's Billiken basketball team. What's strange is that, even though they all look pretty much the same to US, he assigned a player's name to each one of them. We assumed that he just named them at random, but when we asked him a week later who each "person" was, he rattled off the names of every player on the team--in the same order. How scary is that?

NOTE: The middle person on the left side of the paper (who you may notice is slightly larger than the others) is "Big" Willie Reed, one of Tyler's favorite players.

While we were in Chicago over the weekend, Tyler spent some time at Taylor's activity table coloring and drawing with her. He must have paid attention to what she was doing--take a look at the picture that was waiting for us in his cubbie at school today when we picked him up:

The funny thing is that Debbie, my sis-in-law, noticed one of Taylor's drawings on the fridge during our visit and she commented that that was the first time Taylor included shoes, hair, shirts, and pants on her stick people. The fact that Tyler memorized all of those details and incorporated them into his own drawing (several days later) amazes me. Oh, and this is apparently he and Allison getting married (he decided at the last minute to change her pants into a yellow skirt for some reason). Maybe there's hope for his art skills yet!