paint cut paste

as a child, i was a HUGE muppet fanatic. i listened to “the muppet movie” soundtrack over and over and over in my bedroom every single day for several years. my favorite holiday album was (and still is!) john denver & the muppets: a christmas together. when i was 5, i had a rainbow painted on my bedroom wall and muppet stuffed animals strewn across my bed. my master’s thesis was titled: “the rainbow connection: the chakra system as a framework for transpersonal art psychotherapy.
” (okay, so nevermind the latter part of the title — i was trying to convey that as an adult, i never got over the rainbow connection piece.) i had a major boo hoo session when jim henson passed. i met his daughter when out with some puppeteer friends when i lived in NYC, and asked her to draw kermit on a napkin, which i kept. i’m a muppet weirdo. yep. so you can imagine my muppet-crazed-child-of-the-70s elation when my daughter fell in love with the muppets, too.

while she has never been into sesame street like many of her friends (N complains, “there’s no plot mommy! it just jumps around, and i want a story!”), she loves all of the muppet show/muppet movie characters that jim henson created. she’s a bit lonely in this, as most of her preschool friends don’t know who gonzo is, but she’s happy to teach them by drawing pictures like this at preschool:

animal and kermit

N is particularly into the muppet band, the electric mayhem:

can you picture that?

when N sees my husband in the morning, the verrry first words out of her mouth are, “be floyd!” most of my days are spent swinging my hair back and forth, saying “fer sherrr” while pretending to be janice. and N is, of course, animal. she will see a letter “A” and say, “that’s what my name starts with, because i’m not N, i’m animal!”

family portrait: floyd, janice, and animal

we play a “guess which muppet i am” 20 questions type of game for hours on end many days, and she LOVES finding obscure characters to pretend to be, like beauregard, lew zealand, sweetums, and dr. bunson honeydew. she often tries to take over when we have our computers on so she can type out “our” names.

because the muppet songs, the muppet show, the muppet movies, the muppet stuffed animals, and the muppet personalities have taken over our home and art for the past three months, i figured i should post about it here. that is authentically the subject matter of most of the art and play happening in our home at the moment. do your child’s favorite characters find their way into the art in your house, too?

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