Tonight, Leilani was doing a bit of coloring on the computer, with one of the many online coloring websites (Disney, Little People, and others). This time, we’d started with Cinderella.
For the first time that I noticed, she was concerned about what colors go where. She never seemed to color randomly, but she would choose one random color, and make the whole picture the same—and then repeat with a different color. We never pushed her to use the “correct” colors, just because it didn’t seem appropriate to make her worry about that.
But this time, without prompting, she asked me what colors to put where. After suggesting a few, and she more or less following (each color has several shades and she didn’t always get the right one), she asked me to do the coloring, then to color the other Disney pictures. She enjoys seeing the pictures of her favorite characters, colored recognizably, just as much as coloring them herself.
But when I found the Lady and the Tramp picture (Susi und Strolch), I tried several colors, but couldn’t get it anywhere near right. That’s when Leilani said “I’ll help you” and as she got off my lap and ran out of the kitchen, she said she would get the book. Not only did she realize the book would help me color the picture correctly, she knew where it was (in the bathroom). Here is the result, approximately.