A Glimpse into the Head of a 3 1/2-Year Old

Do you ever wish you could see the world through someone else's eyes...just for a few minutes? I do. I am constantly transposing my brain into the head of an old French farmer watching me drive by with The Dandy Warhols playing, ok...a bit too loudly, on the car stereo. Or the supermarket checkout girl as I trade toddler stories with her in my super-duper American accent. Or even Ella, as she watches my children with obvious jealousy as we feed them food straight from the table.

But the heads I would most like to get into are those of my kids. I am still weirded out whenever I let myself think of how these two people actually came from me. And I spend an inordinate amount of time hoping I won't completely screw this parenting thing up, forcing them both into years of therapy. And now they're running around showing their own personalities as well as thinking their own thoughts. Max is just on the verge of being able to tell me what he thinks himself. Lucia is still a complete mystery.

So when I walked into the kitchen the other day and saw Max taking a picture of his foot with my digital camera, instead of getting upset (I'm the one who left the thing on the kitchen table, after all), I asked calmly for the camera, and then, taking a look at it, realized he had taken a whole series of photographs. Uninfluenced by any one else. The world, or at least two rooms in my house, through the eyes of my three-and-a-half year old son. A priceless insight into his creative mind. Or so I hoped. These are the things that caught his attention, in chronological order...

The kitchen table, as seen from his height. If I wanted to, I could read all sorts of things into the group of objects he chose to represent. The car key (desire for freedom and independence), the sunglasses (the constraints of seeing the world through an adult-imposed filter), the blue plastic bib (the crushing, yet comforting, realization that he is still just a child), and the brown plastic chicken resting its head on my glasses (um...). But, being honest with myself, I know he had just grabbed the camera off the table and was probably testing to see if it was on.

Next, he walked into the adjoining room, Laurent's and my bedroom, and took a photo of Ella holding a stick in her mouth, with her dog bed and the trash can in the background. Pretty good centering for a toddler, not to mention the inclusion of a dynamically receding perspective, created by his angling of the rug and tiles.

My slipper next to the piano leg, and a ray of sunlight cast across the terracotta tile floor. The poetry of the composition is somewhat compromised by the fact that he included the pile of dirty laundry hanging off the piano bench in the upper left corner, which could be translated as a commentary about the introduction of evil into a utopian world, trouble in paradise, the corrosion of natural beauty by original sin...or just the fact that Mommy is really messy.

I could swear that I've seen this photo hanging in a London gallery and priced at $10,000.

And finally, the artist's shoes, the edge of his finger, and a bit of the camera strap hanging into the lower right edge of the frame. One could say that the artist is imposing himself, as well as the tools of his trade, into the composition, Vermeer-like, attempting to remind the viewer of the artificial and contrived nature of art and the humanity of its maker.

Either that or he was just trying to get one more random shot in before his mom took the camera away.