Mr. Perfectionist

Oh Dash, I'm so sorry you inherited my obsessive perfectionism in all things creative.  It's the main reason I never pursued becoming a "real" artist, and why I fear going back to design school - I know how crazy I get and how much time it takes me to revise and revise and revise every design, and how it kills me when I can't get a project exactly right.  I hope that you can figure out how to constructively work with this perfectionism and not just give up (like mommy), or get pissed off (like daddy, who is also a perfectionist when he's working on his various projects).

Why am I worried about this?

Dashiell is obsessed with painting pictures of Tyler Park.  It's awesome, really, but in order for him to get one picture he was happy with this last time he attempted it, he had to re-start his project 6 times!  It was almost 7 because one of the purple rocks at the bottom of the final picture had bled into the black road, but thankfully he was able to correct it by dabbing away the offending purple (I had to help with that) and painting extra black onto the road.

For being three I think he does a very good job with his representation - the purple blobs are the big rocks he likes to climb on, the purple streak is the walking path through the park, the green is the grass, the green blob with the black streak is his favorite tree, and the black streak at the bottom is Westford Ave.  We were playing in the park earlier that day and he counted all the bigger rocks at the Westford Ave. side of the park so he could add them into his next masterpiece, and mentioned added the road too.  Then that afternoon he set off to work!  But he would start a painting, then determine it was "not right", and ask for a new sheet of paper so he could start over.  Knowing how that kind of thing drives me crazy too, I indulged him instead of trying to talk him into settling for a picture that might not be up to his high standards (though I did try a bit with the one that's in the middle of the top row - it showed a lot of promise!).  I should probably figure out how to get him to let go a little and realize the beauty in imperfection.  Which I have mentioned to him, but it's a hard concept to get when you're three-years-old.  Or thirty-eight-years-old.  Yeah, we're both going to have to work on that...