We don’t do a whole lot of arts & crafts around my house. It’s not that I have some aversion to it. I actually enjoy painting and the like, but it’s really challenging with little kids. It’s usually super messy, set-up & clean up take 45 minutes while the project itself only lasts 10 and the resulting project will either end up in the trash or a box in the garage within 3 days.  Today, however, I decided we were going to throw caution to the wind and break out the paints.

After 20 minutes of gathering up all the supplies, paint-proofing the dining room table, paint-proofing the kids and finding some frames to use on the final products we were finally ready to get down to business.  I discussed with the kids it might be a good idea to have a game plan of what they wanted to paint before they started.  I suggested we all try to paint the same thing. No one liked that idea one bit.  My 5 year-old (Cooper) finally announced he was going to paint a beautiful day at the park. The 3 year-old (Greyson) declared he was going to paint a dragon and the 2 year-old (Ela) decided she’d go with the dragon idea too.  With that, the paint started to flow.

Ela slowly and meticulously, as if she were performing some surgery, began to place paint on her canvas.  That whole dragon idea went out the window right away and she slowly began to create something that closely resembles a plate of melted skittles.

Greyson had a completely different approach.  He held tight to the belief that more is better.  The more paint, the more colors, the more you can swirl them all together…the better. Despite my repeated reminders not to double, triple and quadruple dip into multiple colors he managed to turn every color brown 🙁 His final product looked an awful lot like a plate of mud.  As he was wrapping up he looked up at me and proudly announced:  “Look at this! It’s beautiful” Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder on this one.

Cooper held true to his original idea of painting a beautiful day. He added in the sun, a tree, some birds, a picnic table and the like.  His frustration with his younger brother for mixing up all the colors was starting to mount by the end.  The final product looked exactly like you would expect a 5 year-old to paint a beautiful day in the park.

After all the clean-up and letting the paintings dry, I mounted them into those frames we had sitting around and hung them on the wall.  I’m certain these won’t hang in these frames forever, but for a while anyway these paintings can avoid the trashcan or the dreaded garage box of stuff we don’t really want but feel too bad to throw away.