Some moms can do it all, and some moms try really hard.  I fall in to the second bucket.  During the weekends, for everyone’s sanity, I try to get the kids out of the house to do something fun in between breakfast and lunch.  Those 4 hours are pretty much the longest hours of the day, and if we don’t do something to use up the time, I can get pretty impatient and the kids can get punchy.  The rest of the day is pretty good because they both take 2-3 hour naps after lunch, then we have a little bit of time before dinner, a tv show and bed.  (yes, I let my kids watch tv.  There is nothing wrong with that.)

It was raining, grey, and cool this weekend, so we did not have many options to take advantage of for getting out of the house.  We would usually go to a park, on a walk, to a beach, etc.  Not this weekend.  But, I had an idea!  We have tons of paint and art supplies, and our nanny is always doing fun craft projects with the kids during the week.  I could do that!  I always have some slight mom guilt when I see all the fun stuff she does with them.  I dont do that stuff.  Why don’t I do that stuff?  I wanted to show the kids that I could be a fun mom and do art with them, too, just like they do with Annie! (Annie the Nanny).

I stripped the kids down to their underwear and diaper, set them in their chairs at the table, and pulled out all the paper and paints!  We were going to paint together, and then we were going to go to the store to pick out a frame to put each of our paintings in!  Good moms have their kids’ artwork framed in their homes, right?

I squirted some paint on Jacek’s paper and he looked at me with delight!  Yes!  I was doing something cool with my kids!  Then, he stuck his finger in the paint, got a big blob on it, and stuck that big blob of paint right in his mouth.  NOOO!  That’s not how you do it!  I cleaned out his mouth, told him not to eat it, and tried again.  I stuck my fingers in the paint and showed him how to do it. It started to go better, until he started painting his body.  Harlow was sitting nicely painting her own picture.  At least I had one having fun.  I tried giving Jacek a paint brush.  He seemed to like that.  Then he started using the paintbrush to paint his hair.  I couldn’t win.

All I wanted was to be the fun mom who had who kids’ perfect artwork framed in her home.  What I got was two kids covered in paint (Harlow decided that since Jacek was painting everything but the paper, she should join in and painted her entire chest.)  On the bright side, I was forced to give the kids a bath in the middle of the day, which meant it didn’t need to be a part of the touch and go bedtime routine that night.

Looking back, I really wanted our day to be perfect, AND it actually was.  We had fun, got to be silly, got to be messy, and then got to have a fun bath time together.  Sometimes happily imperfect is better than stressed and perfect after all.  And if all the layers of paint on the pictures they created ever does dry, I’m still going to frame them and hang them on my walls.