I'm Going to Need to Do More Yoga

Because summer vacation is approaching, and that means two full days a week with no preschool summer camp. Two full days of feeding the little beast's ravenous and ever growing need for entertainment, activities, play dates and watermelon slices. Mama's going to need a giant reserve of Zen to get through the summer.

Today we painted. Yesterday, during an epic garage cleaning, we uncovered the Melissa & Doug art easel we'd purchased for Hannukah, before my head-spinning present-buying shopping spree was put in check by Husband, who is far more sensible than me. We set it aside, thinking we'd take it out later. I guess six months after the fact constitutes "later," so here we are.

It started out awesome. Old sheet down for a drop cloth. Paints cups in the little paint holders. Paintbrushes. Happy Ethan.

oooh, primary colors. So pretty. So clean and pretty.

pretty clean brushes. So nice.

He looks so happy! Little did I know it's because of the havoc he was planning to wreak on our home the second I turned my back.

He started painting & the Ethan paparazzi (seriously, I hope all this picture-taking is a positive self-esteem booster and isn't planting the seeds to some disturbing paranoia later in life) started clicking away.

do you hear the "ooh la la"?!

So happy! So artistic!

"Don't you have something to do in another room, Mom? Maybe a dish to wash? A grocery list to write up? Or maybe you need to pee? Hmmmmmm? I'll be fine here alone. Really."

"I'll just keep painting like this; I can totally be trusted on my own with four cups full of paint. No problem!"

So I went. Did the dishes. Wrote a shopping list. I even had the audacity to spend approximately 45 seconds in the bathroom. Alone. Sweet fancy Moses, the peace of it all!

And then I heard, "Mommy, come see!"

Whatever comes after that phrase, as I'm sure you know, rarely ends well.

In the living room, I found my son fully up to his wrists in paint, brushes having been abandoned. Okay. That's not bad. It's kind of cute.

Until I realized that he'd gotten wrist-deep in the paint by, well, shoving his entire fists into each paint cup. The pretty primary colored paint cups. Oh my. That's not pretty anymore.

And let's not talk about the carpet. Yes, the carpet that I covered with a sheet-sized drop cloth. I didn't think to take pictures of that because I was too busy hyperventilating and spraying gallons of Martha Stewart's carpet cleaner onto the paint-splattered carpet. Thankfully, Martha may be a crazy bitch, but she makes a great carpet cleaner and tonight our carpet shows no signs of having been ravaged.

Now, I am far from Mommie Dearest when it comes to messes. We play with five or six different colors of play-doh at a time. I don't get twitchy about the colors getting mixed up. Hell, I encourage my kid to jump in puddles and to dive into melting ice cream with abandon. Messes don't bother me. Usually. But for some reason, perhaps the fact that there is only a week left of school, today it made me a little twitchy. A lot twitchy. I had to really dig deep into my yoga breathing while I went through an entire roll of paper towels cleaning the puddles of paint and sent Ethan into the other room so I could count to 10. Or 100.

Looking back on the pictures (which only paint a tiny piece of the whole picture), I realize it's not that big of a deal (and that my kid is freaking adorable and how could I ever be even slightly irritated by anything he does???!!). Kids make messes; I'm pretty lucky that my kid, in general, doesn't make big messes very often. So I lose my mind a little bit when he does. Perhaps he needs to make big messes more often, to give me an opportunity to get used to them. Or maybe not....

Either way, less school for Ethan is going to mean more yoga for mama. Serenity now....