Fourth Stay-at-Home Day of the Leatherman Christmas

On the fourth stay-at-home day of the Leatherman Christmas, we colored 109 pages from the Rudolph coloring book.

No kidding -- 109 pages colored, and I probably tore out 100 of them.

Clarice (colored by Cal)

Early in our 11 stay-at-home days, I broke out the Rudolph coloring book I had bought at Costco earlier in December.  This thing rivaled Tom Clancy novels in thickness and character coverage.  I believe every character-scene combination easily had 5 pages to color.  Rudolph and Fireball, Rudolph and Clarice, Rudolph and Hermey, Rudolph and Hermey and Yukon, Rudolph and Hermey and Yukon and the Abominable Snow Monster, Rudolph and Santa, Rudolph and Santa and Donner, Rudolph and Donner, the head elf alone, the head elf and Hermey, all to only scratch the surface of the main characters.  There was a page with Mrs. Donner and Clarice walking across the ice to the left and then another page with essentially the same scene, this time walking right.  All of the “Misfit Toys” had multiple pages to color – Charlie in the Box, the spotted elephant, the train with square wheels, the cowboy who rode an ostrich, the bird who couldn’t fly but could swim, the scooter (which I can't remember what made it misfit)… all of these and more were in this coloring book.

109 pages is roughly half of the coloring book, maybe a little less. To qualify for the count of pages we colored, a page need only have evidence that a crayon touched it.  This rule ensured that Ella's contributions and Cal's half-colored/half-scribbled pictures were included. So “coloring” included Ella’s scribbles, Cal’s successes staying in the lines, Cal’s failures and subsequent quits at staying in the lines and a handful of Dan’s and my works of art.

Cal tried to enforce rules on himself and everyone else, too. The reindeer should be colored brown, Santa's hat and coat should be colored red and any Christmas tree should be colored green. Everyone was free to color the balled ornaments whatever color he or she wanted. And given that we watched Rudolph seemingly incessantly over the course of our 11 stay-at-home days (see Second Stay-at-Home Day of the Leatherman Christmas), Cal eventually learned what colors the characters' clothes, hats and, in the case of the toys, exterior decorations should be and provided guidance as we colored the lesser-known characters in the pictures.

We had only a few "fights" while coloring the 109 pages. Sometimes, Cal would start coloring a page and then quit, apparently failing to meet some "quality" criteria he had in his head for himself. I thought this was wasteful, and I was afraid he was holding himself to a level of perfection that I don't want him to be doing at 4 years old.  So I called him on it and insisted he continue to color the "problem" page or sometimes take a break.  Other times, Ella would scribble on Cal's page which just lead to my need to jump in to keep the peace. And a couple of times Cal actually colored, unsolicited, part of my picture. Now, this didn't lead to a fight other than with my own self. A perfectionist myself, I would have preferred it be colored my way by me; however, clearly, that wasn't the point of our coloring extravaganza.

At any rate, I thought I'd share a few of our works of art:

Abominable Snow Monster (aka Bumble) -- that's Ella's work of art in the middle;
Cal colored the other two.



Variations of the misfit scooter -- Cal's work is on the left, Ella's on the right.



Yukon Cornelius looking straight (by Dan), looking left (by me) and looking right (by Cal).
These were colored before Cal was providing color direction.


And lucky for us, we've got the other half of the Rudolph coloring book to color next Christmas.