"Mommy, Leave Her Alone. She's Just Being Cur-ative!"

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So Scarlett has a new thing.

It’s called: being covered in marker for the larger part of everyday no matter how many times I bathe her. I mean, it’s called drawing.

This is where my mom jumps in to complain about how I only bathe my kids every other day unless there’s some dire reason to do it more often. Apparently only bathing your kids every other day is a generational thing and my brothers and I were bathed everyday of our lives, whether we needed it or not, not that she’s judging or anything ;-). Marker on my childrens’ arms and hands and face and behind their knees and in between their toes and on their teeth used to constitute a dire need for bathing. But as of yesterday - the fifth day in a row Scarlett’s gotten a bath at both the middle of the day before we left the house and bedtime, only to become soiled twice as badly ten minutes later with the same marker I just wiped off - IT DOESN’T.

I can’t purge my house of these dry erase markers either because they’re literally a staple in Matthew’s daily life. He learned to write using this Melissa and Doug dry erase board when he was two. He learned to tell digital time with it by using it to practice writing down what time it was on the microwave every time it changed. He writes me sentences now and little notes on it and I use it to teach him letter combinations and math now. Plus, he can draw 32,000 different pictures on it a day without any one of them winding up on the kitchen floor because the baby pulled it off of the fridge AGAIN. And again. And again. And again. This board is like magic, and I love it, and Matthew loves it and once I showed it to Scarlett SHE loved it. Which I just thought was the bees freakin’ knees until this showed up for the first time:

And honestly, even after that I still didn’t mind. I just thought I’d have to keep a better eye on where the markers wound up. I talked to Matthew about how to be responsible and put them away immediately after he’s finished using them. He readily agreed.


But then he forgot.


And she wrote on the table.


Then he forgot again.


And she wrote on the floor.


Then he forgot again.


And she wrote on his carpet.


Then he forgot again.


And she wrote on the cabinets.


And every time that she wrote on something, she accidentally wound up with it inside of her ears and under her fingernails and over her eyebrows and in her hair and all up and down her arms and positively covering her clothes. And that was without trying to write on herself.


Then, oh my word!, she discovered that you CAN write on yourself. What a fun new thing! And life for me has been a very long series of baths and baby-wipe rub-downs every since. And shockingly little else. Seriously. Shockingly.


The up side though? (Because with a face like that, there’s always an up side…)
She really does love to draw. And it’s just hard to hate anything that makes her this happy.

Even when it drives me FREAKING BANANAS.