Last night after dinner, Alden was napping, Robbi and I were trying to get a bit of work done, and Kato was doing his best to clean up the studio.

Although we appreciated the gesture, Kato lacks judgment when it comes to choosing which items should be thrown away. Example: I pulled my favorite stapler from the waste basket yesterday. Therefore, we decided to direct his energies in other directions. We wondered if it was, perhaps, time to give him a chance to see what he could on the art front. We handed him a marker and a piece of paper and told him to have at it.

At first there was confusion. Kato discovered the futility of trying to draw with the marker cap. It was one of those moments that will shape him as a man.

But once he grasped the concept, we left him to his work and we returned to ours. Moments later, he had completed his first drawing, but the evidence suggested that he still didn’t quite understand how art was supposed to work.

He explained that by using his face as a canvas, he was embracing the ephemeral, highlighting the transient nature of form. It was a commentary on mortality, he said, with no small degree of indignation.

We were concerned that his early exposure to such existential questions might result in expensive teenage counseling sessions. We pleaded with him to act like a normal baby and be content to scribble haphazardly on a piece of paper.

He rolled his eyes and acquiesced, if only to humor us. Here’s what he came up with.

Satisfied with the drawing’s age-appropriate lack of meaningful expression, we removed the Collected Works of Nietzche from his crib.

There is time for those big riddles of ontology down the line.