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I told the kids a story that I made up on the spot called, “When King Winter and Sister Spring had a Quarrel.” I hope to type it all out here. I tried to jot down most of it after I told it but I’m pretty sure that it changed a little from my spontaneous telling…
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A portrait of me by my youngest:

A mother’s day gift from my oldest…

I took a picture that I have no memory of and wrote down my own interpretation of this picture with my mother…

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This is the first page of my morning pages notebook:

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My favourite coffee mug overflowing with the goodness in my life:

My daughter’s glass…

My husband taking a stab at this prompt, pushing his edges and comfort zone:

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We spent some time at home preparing our art to be anonymously installed in public spaces. The goal: MAYBE spread a little joy today.


We posted one of our guerrilla art flyers in our local coffee shop and the staff gave them free lemonade in support of our mission:

We returned to one flyer at the end of the day…people definitely took what they needed and the kids were a little sad that they needed it in the first place:

We left this nice message in one of the free newspaper stands…

And armed with sidewalk chalk, we wrote messages in public spaces like in front of this police station:

And in front of this downtown post-secondary art school…


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We started with the drawing exercise and each of us took turns calling out an instruction. Here were the instructions:
1. Draw a circle.
2. Draw 5 lines.
3. Draw dots in the circle.
4. Draw a mountain shape.
5. Draw a heart.
6. Draw 2 squares.
7. Draw a half circle.
8. Draw 2 triangles.
9. Draw a horizontal line.
10. Draw a wavy line.
Here is what everyone revealed after we came together again:

We are waiting for the weekend to finish the rest of the prompt when the entire family can do it together…
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Letter play. I could do this all day…
The kids playing with letters…


Some of their words…





I used conte to cover my page with black and then used an eraser to “draw” my word…


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Playing with lines…


Some of the kids’ nature drawings…


My nature items…

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An afternoon outside included sky gazing, sky drawing, and other creations…
After doing a paint wash of blue, I added clouds and another layer of blue in chalk pastel…My children insisted they saw a little yellow – the sun glowing behind the clouds which I noticed later:

My 5 year old son’s sky…he focused on one particular cloud that was moving by and kept trying to follow it…:

I took a picture of the sky and then asked the kids to describe any words that came to mind as they looked up at the sky:
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Kids’ spirals on the chalkboard…practicing going from in to out and out to in and nesting spirals within spirals and spirals with our feet…


After drawing with the kids, I sketched this spiralling chambered nautilus and wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem The Chambered Nautilus around the spiral…

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For more info about mayBE, read here first.
You will find the growing list of prompts here and also some photos of my interpretations of the prompts…