What IS art?

One big pro of daycare for me is that it has allowed The Girls to do plenty of artwork. I am not an artsy or craftsy person by nature myself and, quite honestly, have little desire to do such projects at home in the time we spend together. (Though, for the record, I do suck it up every once in a while and do something really basic.) So, the fact that they get a chance to do this at daycare (and school for The Big Sis) is awesome. Three cheers for daycare!

However, one big con of daycare for me is all of the artwork (“artwork”) they come home with. At our last daycare, I thought I had finally figured out a pretty good system to determine what to keep and what to recycle. Basically anything with a handprint or a footprint was kept, as well as anything that showed a noticeable developmental progression. That way I was keeping a small selection of the good artwork but didn’t feel pressure to keep every little thing.

Then we switched daycares.

I swear the ONLY projects our new daycare does involve handprints and/or footprints! This is overall not a complaint, as they produce some nice kid artwork — much cuter projects than our last daycare — but it doesn’t help me pare down the volume of artwork that comes home if I continue with my previously successful system for what to keep and what to toss.

Thankfully the amount of artwork to come home has slowed down in elementary school, at least compared to daycare standards, so presumably there’s an endpoint to it within the next couple of years.