Know what the definition of insanity is? (No, not the one about doing the same thing and expecting different results.) It's doing a painting project with seven kids, average age 5.7 years, and one tired adult.
Our theme this week is painting, and so I bought little 99-cent wooden plaques from Wal-Mart for each child. I also bought stencils and those funny foam paint brushes. A bunch of old T-shirts, six garbage sacks covering the table, paper plates and cups all around, and we were ready to begin.
What a crazy forty minutes followed! I went from child to child, pouring paint, using paper towels, mopping spills. We taped the stencils on the plaques, and discovered that if you used too much water, the stencils didn't work. We learned that you can help your two-year-old paint his initial, but you can't stop him (or his four-year-old brother) from painting right back over it. Gee's painting is called, "A Covered G", because, well, there was an orange "G" on a yellow background, but now there's just an orange blob with a few other colors mixed in for good measure.
I stopped myself from trying to "help" too much--not that I had time to control anything but the location of the chaos. Each child is so proud of their creation. And I think it might have been a success. (Exhausting, but good.)
Clockwise from the strange brownish one at the top left: Hebs, Zee, Yum-Yum (I did that one to show them an example), Sky, Em, Eff (he made his for his big brother, sweetheart that he is!), Gee, and the middle one is Lala's.
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