"Use your imagination"

Chinnu likes to say "use your imagination". This is something she's picked up from Barney and also apparently hears in school. It's amazing how imaginative kids are and how unimaginative adults become. I am a prime example. When I gave her the puppy to color, I could not tear away myself from telling her to color the dog in one color. "Let's make him all red like Clifford" I tried to coax her. "or brown, like a real dog". But if my chinnu has inherited one thing from her parents, it's stubbornness. Notice the s in the parents - so she has twice as much of this quality as I do. "Why don't you just let her do what she wants?" S barked at me in irritation. Now, does he understand how much I love to color myself? Not a bit. I actually make trips to Michael's with the sole purpose of buying Fuzzy Posters that I totally enjoy coloring. Ever since I have no time for more "serious" art, this is what I do. So Imagine my pain when I start to see my beautiful uncolored puppy with so much potential, sprouting red ears and a blue forehead. At this point, I tear myself away from my offspring and decide to not look at the thing at all until it's finished ("maybe she'll have a pleasant surprise for me after all"). It so happened that Chinnu had 3 days off from school and spent those days with her grandparents. I sent the puppy along and asked her to work on it. One evening, it came back fully done and I was proud of my little bundle of joy. Despite knowing a real dog is not any of these colors (other than Clifford), she came up with this. Not only that, the flowers are all in monochrome (which, other than fine details, they usually are). "Well", I thought sadly to myself, "I would never have had the imagination to create something so unreal".