With Grace

My five year old granddaughter drew me a picture of the inside of her brain today. Believe it or not this is the second picture I have of the inside of a brain. The first one is an oil painting that my oldest daughter created while in rehab after a car accident which left her brain injured. Today she doesn't remember painting the picture, but I do...

The second one was a four color crayon drawing done in a restaurant on the back of a kid's coloring page. Earlier today while I was pushing her on a swing in her back yard, she asked me, "Nana, why does my body feel funny when I'm afraid?" We had a short discussion on how your brain thinks but because your brain is part of your body, it effects the rest of your body too. After a couple hours through all her activity, she was still mulling. Then she said, "Nana, don't look I'm making you a surprise." Oddly enough the shape and size of the drawing was similiar to a real brain. I asked her, "Which place is the fear?" She pointed to the black area about the size of the hypothalamus. "What are the other areas?" The little thalamus-sized green area was for "what I'm going to do". There were two larger hemispheric-sized areas. The red one was "where ideas come from" and the purple one (her favorite color) was "where I decide what to draw".

Meet Grace....