A Special Gift

Our good friend Elizabeth is not only the very best colleague that I could really ask for at the museum, but she is also a talented artist, a great humorist, and a loving adoptive aunty. While Monica and I are both really happy and excited for her that she's been accepted into the graduate printmaking program at the Rhode Island School of Design, we're also sad that she'll be leaving for the other side of the country. She'll be missed a great deal, and, I suspect, she'll be missing little Tate. She made this wonderful print of the little man over the last couple of days. Note the little peanut shapes in the green field behind Tate's figure. She has been perfecting her practice of a mode of printmaking called cast acrylic monotype, a kid of relief monotype printmaking developed by the Bay Area artist Joseph Zirker, who had an exhibition at the NMA in 2005.
Also, Tate has begun laughing at 10 weeks of age. He's been practicing with his diaphragm muscles for a couple of weeks, but for the first time this week he had an honest to goodness laugh at tickles to his second little chin, and funny little sounds his mom and dad make for him now that their sole goal in life is to provoke such sounds and smiles. Great Grandma Robertson will be arriving Saturday to witness it all.