Eric Carle and Officer Spaghetti

Peanut's teacher told us about the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst right before we left. It was a perfect recommendation. While very small, it was thorough and had several things to keep children's attention beyond the gallery: an art room to make a project, sprawling lawns to run across, a cafe with clever details like cookies with a hole in them (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and an auditorium showing twisted Steig cartoons. (I should note that Steig puts knots in my stomach and we almost left early.)

There was a particular display case showing the process of Carle creating a book: his very first sketch, some words, consecutive pages showing minute or grand changes until the final page as we know it finally emerges. To see an artist's work like this felt akin to being a fly on the wall.

Little Man would have sat and watched the monitor with Carle demonstrating his art all day long if I'd let him. It's like 5 year old fun with old-man skill. He draws an animal, then paints entire sheets of tissue paper, then cuts appropriate shapes from the tissue and pastes them into his drawings until the animal is "colored". Eric Carle is a geeeenius. (Tomcat joined his official fan club years ago!)

As much as we all enjoyed it, no one appreciated this stop more than Grandma. She was giddy. This may be the first genre of art that Grandma has deeply taken to. She said she'd like it "all over her apartment". There were also numerous original illustrations by other artists, that surely illicited a sentimental reaction from her. Original Shepherd, Margaret Wise Brown, William Steig, Dorothy Lathrop (the first Caldecott Winner) and dozens more.

On our way out of town Officer Spaghetti pulled me over. It would seem there are a lot of things Massachusetts doesn't like about our car right now. It was going 65mph in a 50. It's rear window is covered in shoe polish and it was missing some boosters (the law recently changed). He was irked and said as much; he thought he'd caught a UMass Amherst student heading home for the weekend, not some crazies like us. He was superb and tickled by our adventure and pretty much advised us to move along, but not quite so speedily.