Thursday, January 10, 2008

Painting - with kids

When I painted the living room and sunroom, the kids were spectacularly uninvolved - by their own choice. The only thing that they did was tell me whether or not they liked the colors. But, now, we are painting Ga'Hoole Girls room. The first thing to understand is that painting in this house is not a short-term deal. I only have about one or two days a week in which I feel well enough to paint, and I'm not ready to let the kids paint alone. So, we plan on painting being a long-term project. In this case, Ga'Hoole Girl and her best friend painted 1/4 of a wall about six months ago. Since then, the room has been an unpleasant yellowish color with 1/4 of a wall a lovely light purple.

On Tuesday, I felt pretty well, so we decided to paint. The kids wanted desperately to use the paint roller. So, Ga'Hoole Girl painted most of one wall with the roller and did an admirable job. My task was the edges, which I enjoyed. Wild Man painted with a brush for awhile and then got his turn with the roller. The good news is that he got lots of paint on the wall. The bad news is that Ga'Hoole Girl and I had to go after him with wet paper towels to clean up all the paint he dripped on the baseboards. But, he had fun.

Another reason we don't paint often is that I want to be in a pretty good mood for it. I want the kids to enjoy their painting time, even if we have to do lots of clean up. And, especially in their rooms, I'm far more interested in developing our relationships and making good memories than having a perfectly painted room.

We only got 1/2 of Ga'Hoole Girl's room painted this week. Next week, we'll touch up the areas that we missed on this side of the room and then move everything to the other side of the room to paint.

Ga'Hoole Girl is a true artist. Her room is going to be a light to medium purple color except for the top six inches all the way around and the wall by her top bunk. Those sections are going to be a deep indigo color. Then, she's going to paint glow-in-the-dark stars on the indigo. She has a gauzy rainbow colored curtain all ready to hang around her bunk bed so that her top bunk can be a reading getaway. It's going to be very cool - and artistic - and colorful.

No comments: