A Month In The Life Of A Wooden Man

[What DOES one do when one neglects one's blog for more a year and wishes to (possibly) start blogging again? Give up and start a new one?

There are many things I find amusing about cats. (Stay with me - I'm going somewhere with this. Plot not lost). In particular I love the nonchalant bottom licking that happens immediately after a failed landing.
I think I shall approach my neglect of this blog in the same manner: by pretending it never happened.

What are YOU looking at?

Groom...groom...groom...]

My Grandfather was an artist. I remember sitting, as a little girl, in the shed in the garden that he used as his studio, perched on a stool watching him paint. It was a magical place. The smell of linseed oil always takes me right back there.

One of the objects he had in his studio was a jointed artists' mannequin which I now have. It (he?) stands on a cabinet tucked away in the back of our living room next to the piano, together with some lovely old tins also inherited from Grandpa.

I, being one of those people who have an inability to see an object that has not moved for any period of time, don't usually pay him much attention.
Until recently.

Recently I realised he was actually catching my eye from time to time. It dawned on me that this was because he was quietly, but regularly (every few days or so), changing position.
And so I decided to keep a surreptitious photo log of his "movements" over a month or so.
Here it is.

1. Man carries his own stick and stand.

2. Man reclines as if sunbathing on conveniently placed black box.

3. Man doesn't want to look at whatever that is he's pointing at over there.

4. Man is distraught when he notices degree of hair loss in the mirror. (At least that is my interpretation of what's happening here).

5. Man has an emergency of the bathroom variety.

6. (Here I'm really not sure) Man is halfway through a pike dive? Man tries Parkour?

I knew immediately who the "artist" was - exactly because I did discover the artwork myself.
Unlike his mother and sisters (but not unlike his father), SirBiggs creates entirely for the pleasure of creating. He appears to have little need for his work to be acknowledged. He shows me some things, but mostly because I've asked what he's doing, or because he thinks I'll find what he's done amusing. It seems he lacks the need (a need I, and I'm sure most of us, have) for approval.

It makes discovering what he's learning (skills and knowledge) tricky. I have to stumble across things he's left lying around, or wait until a sibling shows me something. Sometimes he'll pipe up with a thought on a car drive which reveals a huge body of underlying knowledge he's absorbed and somehow processed. 

If I ever have to quantify what he knows I am positive I will underestimate.

These little clues do, though, reassure me that learning is happening, and happening well, albeit in a way that seems strange and dangerously haphazard to a very structured, systematic learner like me.

His private nature can have lovely outworkings. Sometimes he will deliberately embark on a little secret project just to surprise me. I woke up a few days ago to find this little note quietly tucked in next to a drawing I'd left on the kitchen table:

"Mom I think your pictures are brillient and < I don't know how to spell it>  butiful and perfect". [With a drawing of a hand in thumbs-up position and a stop sign saying "Don't STOP drawing"]

So now I know he knows he doesn't know how to spell "beautiful".
Yet.