Pabu Smurf

Nicole's been under the weather, so I got to help Random with her class today.  I'm not sure exactly what the class is called, but it's part structured activity, part chaos.  Even with Nic's tips, I'm not sure I was prepared for the experience.

One thing I wasn't aware was that this was messy week.  I'd come directly from work, so I wasn't really dressed down.  Turns out that the main event was apple painting.

No, not painting apples.

Stamping fruit cut in half into a puddle of paint and then stamping it on a piece of paper.

Despite my initial panic, it wasn't as messy as I thought it would be at first blush, however.  Mostly this was because of Pabu, bless her heart.

First we had activity time, in which she struggled to stay on my lap (she wanted to go and crawl around.  She's usually so complacent, but tonight, the other kids were all sitting still for their parents, and Pobbes wanted oh you tee, you see?

Right after, we headed for the paints.  There was a lot of space at the table, since that's unstructured time.  Many kids went to play with toys, run around, kick balls, and play in the giant pasta bin.  

She loves little chairs, and she very delicately climbed up onto the nearest one.  I helped her pick up the fruit and stamp it in the paint.  I think the instructors didn't have Random in mind when they designed this activity.  There's no handle on fruit, so she had a very hard time trying to palm the fruit in her hand.  When she did finally pick it up, she got paint on her hand.

She looked up at me as if she was bleeding (it was red paint, after all), and I got a napkin to wipe her down.  Then it happened again.  I stamped the fruit on her paper, trying to get her involved, but she wasn't having any of it.

Finally, we gave up.  I took the paint over to dry, and we went over to the marker department.  She's an interesting colorer.  She would prefer more to open the marker and close the marker over using the marker, and she opened and closed every marker in the bin, while I drew faces, wrote color words, and outright colored.  

Eventually, she scribbled on her picture. 

So given how daintily she reacted to the painting incident, I decided to try something.  I took a blue marker and made a single blue dot on the back of her right hand.

She looked at her hand.  Kind of stared at it, really.  Then she looked up at me, and back down to her hand.

So I did what any father in my position would have done.  I did it again.  It looked like a little blue snake bite.

This time, she got a look on her face.  I'm not sure I've seen the look before. I couln't tell whether she was angry at me, or whether she was hurt by what I'd done, or whether she was just getting tired.  Perhaps she has her very own inscrutable look.

Whatever she was thinking, she reached up for the marker.  I handed it to her.  

Just as the marker passed between us, I realized my mistake.  "Uh oh," I thought, and time slowed to a crawl.  My mind raced well ahead.

Before I could really do anything about it, she had colored the entire back of her left hand blue and was on her way up her arm.  Before my eyes, she was turning herself into a Smurf (or Violet Beauregard) I realized in my experimentation, I'd inadvertently taught her to color on herself, a lesson I'd have to get her to unlearn, and quick.

I took the marker from her (gently), and told her that we don't do that (silly hypocrite, Daddie!), and she immediately went back to coloring on the paper.

But if she ever gets a tattoo, I will always consider it my fault for teaching her to color on herself.