This Deserves Its Own Post

I know I said I was going to get to an updating type thing, and I think I've got quite a few pictures on the camera that I need to sort through and post, but something happened yesterday that deserves attention of its own.

We hosted the 4th of July party yesterday. It was, in fact, our 10th annual 4th of July party. Over the years we've hosted a variety of our holiday parties, but the 4th of July is the only one that we've had here every year.

One of our sort-of traditions (in that we don't do it EVERY year, but we've done it a few times over the past several years) is to put a fresh coat of spray paint on the giant aluminum canoe of Kris' that lives in our backyard. We have no particularly good reason to paint the thing, except that it is here, we usually have extra spray paint to get rid of, and it's good for killing about thirty minutes.

So, last night, in the lull between when the kids had fired off all of their daytime fireworks but it still wasn't dark enough yet for them to shoot off their nighttime ones, we pulled out the canoe and several people--mostly the kids--set to work on it.

And someone thought it would be a good idea to let Gabe have a go with a can of black spray paint.

He was shown how to hold the can and push the button on top to make it shoot paint in the right direction. I was trepidatious. Just two weeks ago, Gabe had his first experience with an aerosol can. He found a can of bug spray on our back porch and, convinced that he needed to put some spray on, started to use it. Instead of carefully "spritzing" himself with it, he sprayed pools of the bug deterrent into his free hand and then spread the puddle of spray around his body. In his effort to cover himself, he used up the entire can--a mostly full can. Pools of bug spray had collected all over the glass table he'd chosen to set it on. His clothes were soaked with spray. His hair was greasy with it.

Not surprisingly, I considered the experiment an unmitigated disaster and forbade him from using the bug spray by himself until he could properly figure out how to control its output. So I wasn't too hopeful about the outcome with the spray paint.

Nonetheless, I didn't want to be a helicopter parent who denied my child the chance to learn something new or have a fun experience just because I could predict a terrible outcome. It runs counter to my nature to NOT be a helicopter parent, but I'm trying. My kids deserve the chance to screw things up on their own. If they don't, they'll never learn. But, in retrospect, this might not have been the best time for me to take a step back.

To make matters worse, Libby had gone inside to give Norah a bath for bedtime, so she wasn't there to be the voice of reason. Also, a fair amount of alcohol might have been slowing my judgment, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.

Anyway, things actually didn't go TOO bad for awhile. He was hitting the canoe with most of the paint. He definitely needed to work on his application and spread of the paint--he was creating a lot of streaks and runs--and more than a little was ending up on his hands, but I figured that wasn't too much of a price to pay. The stuff on his hands would wear off eventually and he was getting to participate in an activity with the older kids.

After a few minutes, we adults grew more confident in his abilities and stopped paying close attention to him. We THOUGHT he'd more or less mastered the art of pointing the can at the canoe and pushing the button.

Then he spun around quickly with a dumbfounded look on his face, and we saw this:

Well we didn't see this EXACTLY right after it happened. I quickly ushered him to the house and told him that he needed to find Libby in the bathroom, get in the bath, and try to wash it off before it dried. This was what was left after Libby tried to get as much off as possible, which wasn't very much of it. Spray paint, it turns out, does not wash off the skin even if it is enamel. She tried to use a little finger nail polish remover, too, but it just wasn't possible to do much since so much of the paint was on his mouth and his skin is just too sensitive for that kind of thing.

At least he didn't get it in his eye, I suppose. But, all the same, I can't take him out of the house until it's faded considerably or I'm likely to have SRS called on me. And I suppose I should consider myself lucky that it wasn't the can of sky blue that he shot all over himself. Or a neon orange or something. It's bad enough that he looks like a poorly cleaned up Vaudevillian black-face performer, but at least he doesn't look like he tried to eat an emergency cone. Oh, wait, maybe I've got that backwards. Well, whatever, we're not going out in public for the next few days no matter what he looks like.