Rice Paint

  My Mom says that tidiness skips a generation. She is immaculate, well-organized, everything in her house has a home-a place it belongs. I hear that her grandmother was the same way. My grandmother and I, however, are a little messier--more cluttered, more tolerant of messes. (After all--a towel, a little cling-wrap, some kitchen/floor/multipurpose cleaner--looks like the mess never even happened, right? :P ). Mom swears that Madelyn is destined to be neat and tidy.

After yesterday's little adventure, I'm almost starting to believe her. A friend of mine--see her blog over at "A Little Piece of Paisley"--and I have decided to, through the holiday months (October-January), take a picture a day of our little ones. They grow so, so fast! So, yesterday, to start things off, I decided it had been too long since Madelyn had enjoyed a bit of sensory play. And, if I could make it Halloween/October/Fall-ish...all the better!

Now, we've done some home-made paint before. It was incredibly runny, however, and Madelyn was quite a bit younger. This time, I mixed some rice cereal and water together to create a sort of globby paste, then mixed it with food coloring. In the spirit of keeping it Halloween-y, I used green, black, and orange. Then, I took six sheets of plain white cardstock--an item my house is rarely without--and taped them together on the back to make one big canvas of sorts. I laid down some towels and globbed my sticky paint all around the page in different places so she wasn't trying to dig it out of the bowl and then get it to the paper. (Since she's in the pick everything up stage, I hoped this would save some of the mess--at least she couldn't spill it!  {See, I'm more mess conscientious than Mom might think!})

Then, I handed Daddy the camera, reasoning that I didn't want to be trying to control a project of that kind of messy potential, and brought Madelyn into the living room, where her new game awaited.  At first, the Chicken seemed smiley and excited.

Then, she touched the goopy rice cereal paint. And she froze. She wiped it on her leg, then stared appalled at the glop on her knee. She tried to scrape it off one hand with the other and was unsuccessful. She looked between me, her Daddy, and the paper in front of her several times with a slightly confused, slightly disgusted look. She does NOT like to get messy (a definite sign that my mother could be correct!)

 She scooted over to me, and I started swiping through the rice paint with my own fingers. Whereas she never really got into playing on the paper, painting Momma turned out to be a blast! She'd scrape paint off the paper and then put it on my hands. Then, she wiped it off onto her own again.

 That is, until Daddy let her taste it. Once he showed her that it was EDIBLE. Well...anyone who knows Madelyn knows that eating is one of her passions.  She loves it. After that, she really lost interest in playing with the paint and stuck, instead, to trying to get it into her mouth. And nose. And hair.

At that point, we decided a bath was in order. I'm not totally sure Madelyn agreed as we were trying to get her TO the bath....but once there--well, there's squirty toys, bubbles, and red cups to be had.  What else is there even to say about that?