Fingerpainting Fail

Actually, I have to classify yesterday as a whole as a Fail. It was just a bad day (well, up until the point where Kris came over and we took a shot before a nice soak in the hot tub, from that point on the day was a Win). It was just a bad day all the way around.

Gabe, who is usually a good napper and has always stuck to a pretty strict (if occasionally inconvenient) sleep schedule, decided, quite noisily, that he wasn't having anything to do with his nap. Two separate attempts led to nothing more than much forlorn screeching and the shedding of many bitter tears (from him--I prefer to shed all my tears inwardly, where they can pool up in my brain and cause very convenient memory lapses). Because he is used to taking naps, when Gabe doesn't get one, he tends to be a bit bipolar. He'll range from manic states of complete, off-the-wall bonkers annoyingness to depressive states of lying on the couch half-heartedly watching Nick, Jr or PBS shows without much interest. Obviously, the lying on the couch phases aren't tough to deal with--as long as whatever show his fickle whims demand we watch happens to be on or available in our every growing supply of digital recordings. But the manic phases can pose a bit of a bother.

Actually, to call yesterday's state of mind "manic" isn't entirely accurate. It was REGRESSIVELY manic. He effectively lost almost six months of maturing. He was throwing toys and tantrums, he was hitting me (which is something he has almost never done--he was never a hitter or a biter), and he was being about as much of a monster as he could be.

This was bad enough, but on top of that, little Button, overachiever that she is, decided that, instead of just one tooth, she'd go ahead and get TWO of them out of the way at the same time. Because of this, she's been terribly fussy and she, like Gabe, decided that sleep was an option she wasn't interested in. Toddlers who don't get enough sleep are a nightmare, but infants who don't get enough sleep probably make up their own circle of Hell. Maybe not Hell, but certainly a big portion of Purgatory is cordoned off with baby gates and all of those just-bad-enough single people and DINKs who never had kids get to spend a few months experiencing the joys they missed out on.

About midway through the afternoon, to top things off, Gabe got his hands on a fingerpainting project he'd done a month or so ago. It had been left in a stack of papers on our hutch in the dining room. Now, normally, I am a savvy enough parent to know that it's necessary to keep reminders of unwanted (unwanted by me, the person who has to clean up afterwards) projects out of sight because, sure as the Coreys will never again have a successful joint venture, if a toddler sees one of these projects, he or she will instantly demand to do another one. But I was somehow remiss about the fingerpainting project--a mistake I won't soon make again.

And demand to do another one is exactly what Gabe did, at high volume, and with more than a little crying when I tried to weasel my way out of it with lame excuses of "I can't find the fingerpaints," and "I bet Momma would really LOVE to fingerpaint with you when she gets home from work." So we fingerpainted.

To make matters worse, I ignored all of my instincts and opted NOT to supply Gabe with only a controlled amount of fingerpaint. I thought, "Ah, he's done this enough times to know what he's on about. I'll just open up the tubs and let him play. He'll only use what he needs."

Ha! Such folly. Within a few very short minutes, Gabe had all but emptied all four of the tubs that I had opened for him. Yeah, that's right, I didn't just open one tub, which would have been plenty to make him happy, I went and set him loose with almost a pint of fingerpaints. He immediately spread the paint all over the table and was, in fact, painting his paper by smearing it across the paint on the table. Possibly a brilliant innovation to the world of painting, I have to admit, but one that required a huge wad of paper towels and, eventually, two kitchen towels to mop up after it was all done. Probably, somewhere down the line, art teachers will pass this technique on to students who are eager to learn a new approach to applying paint to paper, but I heartily regretted allowing its genesis mere moments after it came into being.

Gabe proudly "creating." He was scooping out entire handfuls of the paint, with gusto--as evidenced by his arms. You have to do some serious paint scooping to get the paint all the way up to your elbows, let me tell you.

Actually, the sheet of paper in front of him was just the first of three that he was able to fill to saturation with the paint he pulled out. One of the sheets was so soaked with paint that I had to carry it, by its corners, outside and let it dry in the sun. I brought it in before I went to bed last night and put it on the washing machine in the back room. It still has damp spots on it this afternoon. So, even though you can't see the paint on the table because the table is so dark, it IS still there.

Yet, even though I allowed an epic mess to be made--one that required about twenty minutes of soaking in a tub whose water eventually turned a murky shade of bluey-brown (sort of like a bruise)--it did successfully change the tenor of the afternoon. From there on out, Gabe was much easier to get along with. Even though he was still a cranky little turd from being so tired, it was as if his mischief quotient for the day had been met, so all of his mood seemed more for show than to have any real malice behind it. So, I guess I can give myself a lower case "w" to go along with my upper case Fail, at least.

I only caught a few moments of the process, somewhat early on. As you can hear in the background, Button was deciding it was her time to shine, so I cut the video a bit short so that I could feed her. This was when I supplied Gabe with the two additional sheets of paper so that he could keep himself busy long enough for me to feed the baby. I think the fact that he thoroughly tasted the paint has to say something about the boy. I just haven't decided yet if it's something good or not.