The Iyalode

She had chores to do, but each time I glanced in her direction and at how engrossed she was with her painting, I let her be.

Eventually, around 6:30pm though, I had to give her a 30 minute deadline so we could get set for tomorrow (Monday).

8:12pm, chores done, house clean, I asked to see the drawing. She said it wasn’t done, and that she planned finishing up in school. I had to take a picture, cos I don’t trust a piece of paper around kids, so I knew I had to document first.

Sending them off to bed, I fetched a stamp I’d customized in her favorite brand name…PINKIE.

How did Pinkie come to be?

Annie came out of me, all white and screaming her head off with tiny pretty lips; so much so the nurses asked me where I got such a white kid from. A few days later, Annie’s bigger cousin saw her picture, said she was so pink and named her Pinkie.

I told the story to Annie at about age 8/9 and she liked it. Prior then, she had given me a brand name to help her with, only for me to discover it belonged to a friend of hers. We had a brief conversation around brand names being sacred…in her defense, she didn’t know; she thought anyone and everyone could use whatever they hear and liked even if it belonged to someone else.

Sometime later, she came up to me saying she wanted Pinkie. Without her knowledge, I set out to helping with fun branding, not for her to start a business just yet but to get her accustomed to the fundamentals.

December 2025, I decided to get her an array of drawing utensils to encourage her art. It was meant to be for Christmas but I got carried away and we opened the gifts around 1st week of December. This marked a turnaround in her drawing skills.

How did she start drawing?

As a toddler, she dribbled like every other kid, nothing spectacular…oh, she could talk! And she could whip up a fiction, with a very active imagination, just like her mom. And I always tried as much as possible to document these rants, which we watch together these days and just laugh a lot.

I encouraged her to engage her creative thinking, never getting tired of her endless talks (of course I did get tired…but I tried to accommodate as much as possible).

As she grew older, I encouraged her to get excited about creative arts generally. I was not sure what her strengths were asides creative thinking but I knew that was a starr. I organized a number of kiddies activities so she could be involved and learn a thing or two. I introduced her to my various arts, just to get her excited. We sang a lot, trying to figure out if that would be her thing; I taught her bead making, designing piggy banks and other stuff, to work up her creative thinking.

When she got better with a pen, I encouraged her to write, thinking she would tow my script writing path. And she did, she wrote some interesting stories; One of which I submitted and paid for publishing when she was seven (7) but the publisher ended up disappointing.

I took her for ballet classes when she said her interests laid there…then for swimming lessons when that became her passion etc.

Randomly though, I saw someone’s art and even though I dont do much of drawings, I told Annie that she could. I encouraged her to trace, fetched videos for her and even got older friends to do virtual trainings for her.

She started with weird scribbling around 7/8 and each time she came to show it off, I clapped and encouraged her on, even though they looked extremely weird.

Then she turned 9 and drew a thing she claimed to be me. Well, it was a short figure, with a protruding belly and weird afro, so  we laughed at that and cheered her on still. From that point, she kept drawing what she thought were human figures and gradually, they took form.

At 10, she showed me a drawing she made which immediately struck me as a picture of her, even though she said she wasn’t sure. I glanced on the wall and saw the portrait she duplicated, and even though it was not a perfect replica, there were things in her drawing that told me under 10 seconds that this was a picture of her…which to me is pretty impressive.

And then today, she drew this beautiful piece from KPop (it think).

#proudmom