Instead of blogging, I was babysitting.

My eldest niece, Niece #1, and I have at least one interest in common–we both really like to draw. That makes babysitting her both very easy and rather fun for me, since as long as we have paper and a writing implement or two, we have a cheap, safe, easy-to-clean-up-after activity with which to pass the time.

I spent much of the day today with her and her little sister, Niece #2, which cut into my complain-about-Batman-comics time. So in lieu of complaining about the outrageous price of Batman #700 or the art in the Firestorm sections of Brightest Day #3 (I'll get to that tomorrow though), I thought I'd just scan and post some of the drawings we did today.

We played a game of her invention where she would tell me what we were going to draw, and then we would each draw it, without looking at one another's work until we were both done.

First, we posed for and drew portraits of each other. Here's me, by her: I moved my right arm from my hip to drink a root beer at one point, hence the scribbled out arm, and the "AW" on the object in my hand.

Here's her, by me: (I know, I know...in my own defense, I didn't use a pencil, just ballpoint pen straight to paper. Most of the drawings I post on EDILW are done in pencil so I can erase out all my screw ups before I ink, scan and post 'em. So as amateur-ish as they all may look, they're actually pretty fussed-over).

Okay, next up were drawings of ourselves with horses: (She's gotten much better at horses since just last April, when she drew them like this).

(Horse, giant deformed pony, same thing).

And finally, there was a pretty complicated assignment.

I was instructed to divide my piece of paper into five sections, and then draw five little pictures of Bella doing things.

Bella is my nieces' year-and-a-half-year-old Shih Tzu...and she's named for Isabella, the queen of Spain that Niece #1 learned about the week before Columbus Day in first grade, not the heroine of a certain popular prose series of Mormon vampire abstinence porn. (Not that there's anything wrong with naming one's Shih Tzu after characters from Such books, or movies based on them—in fact, I have a Yorkie named "Jacob's Abs"*)

Here's what I came up with: Going clockwise, that's Bella cooking, Bella piloting a helicopter, Bella hang-gliding, Bella racing tiny little cars with my chocolate lab roommate Yogi, and Bella running away from an angry crocodile.

And more or less clockwise again, we have Bella piloting an airplane I'm told is labeled "Flying Dog" while my father's Shih Tzu Yankee hangs on to the back, Bella dancing with Yankee and another Shih Tzu of my niece's acquaintance, Bella on top of a lighthouse waving at Yankee in a boat, Bella and Yankee playing tee ball, and Bella and Yankee going camping.



*No I don't