painted

We went to the museum yesterday......in fact, we bought a membership so we'll be going a lot more frequently!! I chose not to take my camera for this trip just because the last 2 times we went I had it, and it just kinda gets in the way. Everything is very hands on and lugging a big ol' camera makes it more difficult to get down and dirty! There will be other trips with pictures. The girl's really love the museum and it is a great activity for hot summer days, and I imagine for icy winter days as well! One of the highlights of yesterdays trip was the face paint. They had washable paint and long q-tips for the kids to paint their own faces.....or anything else they wanted to paint. Maddie and I painted our own faces, I painted Dan's and Dan painted Charlotte! It was a lot of fun, and the girls really got a kick out of the fact they could paint all over themselves.

There were two little girls that showed up to the station when we were finishing up, and they were SO excited to paint on themselves. At first their mom told them that they couldn't paint on themselves at all, and then she relented and said they could only paint on their arm, and it had to be something really tiny. The girls looked so disappointed. The older one was trying to convince her mom to let her paint her face, but the mom just kept telling her no, and that she didn't want her to make a mess. It made me really sad! Mess is what kids do. It's how they learn. Yes, it is inconvenient at times. Yes, as the adults we have to bear the brunt of their mess, but isn't it worth it? Those two little girls wanted so badly to paint their faces, they would have had so much fun doing it, and from personal experience (with four faces to clean off) it was really easy to clean up. The whole thing reminded me of Kate from Jon and Kate Plus Eight. She is insane about her kids getting dirty or ruining their clothes. I remember watching an episode (this was back when we actually had cable) where they took their kids to the Crayola factory and they made clay figurines. They were supposed to pain their figures when they were done and Kate wouldn't let them do it. She didn't want them to get dirty. Almost all of the kids cried. Whats the point? So what if they made a mess? So what if they dirtied their clothes? So what if the stains wouldn't have come out? It seems to me that happy, smiling, content, paint covered children would be a far better than disappointed, angry, crying kids!

My girls have stains on their clothes that don't come out, they have scraped knees and dirty faces, but they earned all of that by having crazy fun! They know that they can jump in the puddles and squish mud through their fingers and Dan and I will be there with smiles on our faces to clean them up.....maybe exasperated smiles, but smiles none the less. Ask yourself if the fun that they will miss out on is worth a clean outfit? More often than not, I think the answer is no! :)