Pinterest Fail

I am a pinterest junkie. I look at that website all the time on my phone, especially at night time when I should be sleeping. There is something so relaxing about looking at the stuff other people find useful or beautiful or interesting. When I was planning activities for us to do with James in the Keys, I got most of my ideas off of pinterest. I had a few leftover that we didn't do on vacation so I decided to try them out at home.

One of the activities was to take shaving cream and mix it with food coloring to make paint that your child can use in the bathtub. It looked like so much fun and seemed easy to clean afterwards, just turn on the faucet and wash it away. That is not how it turned out. To be fair, James was really cranky before I got all the stuff together to do it, so I probably should have put it off for another day. I thought it would be so fun that he would snap out of his bad mood. Nope.

Here he is getting started:

 I put him in our bathtub because it is bigger and I thought he would have more room to paint. What I didn't consider is that in his bathroom the walls around the bathtub are all tile, almost to the ceiling while in our bathtub, the painted walls start a few inches past the bathtub. Almost immediately after getting food coloring dyed shaving cream all over his hands, James smeared large hand prints all over the walls! I had no idea how I was going to get the stain out of the wall and I spent the rest of the time telling James over and over to paint only in the bathtub and not the walls.

He had fun for a little while while I googled how to get food coloring stains off of walls:

Then he discovered that if he got the brush a little wet, he could fling droplets all over the bathroom.

 Once he noticed that his hands were stained blue, he started to get upset. He kept asking me to "wash it off". This kid doesn't not like having his hands dirty!!

It was getting late, so I told James that it was time to wash it off and take a bath. He was not interested. I tried just turning on the faucet and giving him a bath right there, but he got so upset that I was washing his masterpiece away that he started screaming so hard he almost couldn't breathe. Since he was covered in food coloring, I didn't want to just pick him up and get my clothes all stained, knowing that he would be kicking and flailing the entire time. I tried to grab him and just wash him off quickly in the water so I could get him out of the tub, but he saw what I was doing and ran to the other side of the tub and immediately smeared his hands all over the walls in defiance. At this point I was so frustrated that I finally got a hold of him and rinsed him off as quickly as I could and took him to his room to get dressed for bed. He was crying so hard that he couldn't catch his breath and all I could think about was the clean-up job that was in front of me once I got him into bed. After a few minutes he settled down and I talked to him about how we can't do fun things if he is going to get so upset when it is time for them to be over. I don't think he comprehended any of it, but at least I tried.

After he went to sleep I tried 3 different chemicals to get the stain off of the walls and the last one finally worked! Thank goodness! Once the tub was cleaned out and the food colored bathroom rugs were put in the washer I practically fell into bed for the night. Sometimes it is good to remember that those pictures on pinterest of blissfully happy and content kids playing obediently with what is in front of them are pictures of one second! Just one! Right before and after could have been total chaos. And probably was :)