This Makes Me Really Happy...

E drew this picture of an airplane this past weekend:

Although he enthusiastically started drawing heads with legs and big smiles sometime last year (and ahead of Z, who wouldn't even try for some time), he has grown timid about drawing and mostly just scribbles, while Z regularly produces pictures like this:

Now, I've written before about how I don't like to compare my kids, and I try not to even think about what M, who was precocious with everything, was doing at their age, but with twins, it's really right there in your face all the time, so it's hard to not think about, and I'm not sure how E thinks about it. Is part of his hesitation in trying due to being afraid he can't draw what Z can? Or am I reading too much into it/projecting?

Z had to get over a major drawing hump this summer, when every time he sat down to draw, he wanted to draw EXACTLY like M. I tried to explain that M has had four more years experience drawing than Z, and that by the time Z is eight, he will be able to draw just like M, but he just wouldn't buy it, until, after one particularly frustrating drawing session, I got out M's old preschool drawing journals and we looked at what M drew when he was four. M's drawings of monster trucks, robots, guns, swords, race cars, pirates and bad guys were still somewhat advanced beyond what Z was drawing at the time, but nothing he couldn't produce if he put some effort to it. After that, it seemed a wall had come down and he now spends a good chunk of each stay home day drawing (he still gets frustrated when things don't come out the way he wants to--who doesn't?--but he no longer expects himself to draw like an eight-year-old). I hope that in drawing this plane, E has broken through a similar wall of his own.