The Creative Salad

More Great Art History Books for Kids

Art is important in our family. We come from artistic families and greatly value making and supporting the arts. In that vein, our family loves picture books designed to develop and inspire an appreciation for the arts in young children.

We greatly enjoy these colorful board books for the babies and toddlers alike:

We adore this more advanced series focusing on exploring the alphabet and numbers through works of art published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

We’ve recently discovered another fantastic art appreciation series written for children to add to our family library:

Published once again by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these Can You Find It? books focus on identifying details within works of art. Think of Where’s Waldo but with an educational, historical twist.

Our daughter adores these books and has spent hours pouring over them.

These particular books were written in 2005 and are no longer widely available in stores (we bought our copies at a local used bookstore). Nevertheless, a quick search online turned up many affordable copies in used form, as well as some other books in this series, plus the Metropolitan Museum of Art sells copies online from their store.

What better way to promote art appreciation than by supporting the museum itself?! If you intend to buy this item, please hop on over there and order your copy today.

Little Girl Table Set For Spring

We picked up this table and three small sized chairs at IKEA a while back. Why spend $25 per chair when you can buy a side table and stools on sale for the same price?! Put together, it’s the perfect set for a three-year old.

Our daughter plays there every day.

This week we clipped some flowers from our garden and placed them in a small bell jar on our play table, transforming the space from hum-drum every day to super special. YES! We finally have enough flowers to clip for bouquets! This is a first from our small, front-yard garden. After two years of hard work, the plants are finally filling out and flourishing. We’re thrilled.

So here we are in our living room, overlooking our garden. A special, child-sized place we eat meals, practice writing letters, and serve play food to our dolls.

Now we can enjoy the result of all our hard work in the yard with this bouquet of beautiful fresh flowers while we read, write, play all week long…

May we enjoy many more hours of fun here and savor fresh cut flowers ALL SUMMER LONG.

Father Daughter Photos

In preparing a kids craft project for Father’s Day I enjoyed going through the multitude of father-daughter photos on our hard drives. Here are some of our family favorites to treasure and make into art!

Road Trip + Recovery

We so enjoyed our girls road trip through Northern California up to Oregon to visit my aunt.

We’re now in recovery mode, so we’re taking the rest of the week off from the blog. We’ll see you next week when we’re feeling more rested!

Girls Road Trip

I love a good road trip.

Load up the car, head out for a long weekend, experience something new: count me in!

I’m sure you’ll find it absolutely shocking that I haven’t been on one in, oh, about four years, imagine that. What with the whole pregnancy and parenting thing, we just haven’t gotten around to it.

This weekend we’re throwing caution to the wind, shaking it up and taking a road trip. A mother-daughter road trip through Northern California up to Southern Oregon to visit my aunt.

We’re leaving Daddy at home for some very needed R&R with a clean house and a pantry stocked full of gluten-laden treats. He’s under strict orders to live it up and, um, clean up after himself (got that, honey!) since my gluten-intolerant ass is leaving the premises.

Now the question remains, did we forget anything? Because I don’t think we packed enough stuff.

We haven’t even gotten the luggage, cooler and purse in the car yet. Oh, and the kid! Can’t forget her!

Enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

Over and out! The girls are heading out…