Poster-paint-a-licious!

Remember how I said in my Five Projects post that one of the projects in my queue was to make use of a little oak end table that has been sitting in my garage for over a year?

No? Didn't you read the post? Figures. Well, at least I am getting a lot of practice typing with my thumbs. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog! Wheee!

"Anyway," he says passive-aggressively to apparently no one...

It looked like I was going to have a little paint left over from the Desk Restoration project so I figured I might as well use it on the little end table. The idea was to turn it from a dust-collecting, space-consuming monument to my laziness into a usable play table for my now one-and-a-half year old.

Not really too much to it. The table was a little tall so I sawed the bottom four inches from the legs. The flat surfaces were painted the same antique white from the Desk project. The idea here was to give my son a blank canvas on which he could get his first exposure to poster paints.

In my head, I pictured a delighted nineteen-month-old toddling up to the table, being given a paintbrush, and having him go to town on the top of it resulting in a brightly colored near random collage of smears, brushstrokes, and handprints. He would be so excited he would not want to quit and mommy and I would have to drag him away giggling for a bath. Maybe some upbeat montage music would be playing in the background. Adorable!

Yeah.

I got some poster and finger paints and foam brushes from an area craft store and set up the table, an old bedsheet, and bunch of little Tupperware dishes on the kitchen floor. After the rainbow selection of fun-time-happiness was set up we let him into the room.

Even as I type this I really have to worry that I am completely unfit to watch over a little human. I mean, I have been around him literally every single day for nearly 600 days and I still saw no problem with my grand plan?!

Cripes...

I think it's worthwhile to describe the scene again. A table in the room where he eats dinner is surrounded by little plastic dishes of attractively colored goo. In each of the dishes is a wooden-handled foam thing that looks like a cross between a toothbrush and a spoon. In walks the nineteen month old who has never been exposed to the concept of "painting"...

Once we demonstrated what to do he did, in fact, show interest in blopping colors on the table and smearing them around with the brushes. And his hands. And his shirtsleeves. And his shirtfront.

Ok, at this point it had gone from cute to gross in less than 5 minutes. Did you know that if you mix every color of the rainbow it turns into a hue pretty close to that of mashed sweet potatoes, my son's favorite food?

Although it took me only about one tenth of a second to think "Ick, that looks like sweet potatoes" after I saw his paint-coated hands, it took him that same exact amount of time to realize the same thing (without the "ick") and suddenly jam all his fingers into his mouth.

We yanked his hands out and wiped them off and wiped his face, tongue and teeth the best we could. He then blopped his hands in the paint and crammed them into his mouth again.

Ok. Done. Time for a bath, little dude.

I plunked him into the tub and mommy took over while I went to clean up the kitchen. I blotted the not-so-great-as-I-pictured-it looking table dry with a towel and placed it in the garage. All the paints were mixed together so no sense in saving those...

Wait.

Hmm... "Non-Toxic". Well, good, that's what I remember reading before we started this process. But, you know... Still, yuck, right? What must have that been like? Here he is thinking he is licking a tasty Gerber's concoction off his fingers...

Look, I don't know how to get from the last paragraph to my current thought so I'll just come out and say it: I drank some paint.

Yep. I, a nearly 40-year-old man well in charge of my faculties, took a big ol' swig of black poster paint on purpose to see how bad the experience was for my son, taste-wise.

For anyone out there who cares to know "Non-Toxic" does not equal "Delicious". After a quick emergency gargle with Coke, I brushed my teeth and tongue until it was time to get him out of the tub.

While we were getting him dressed for bed I sheepishly told my wife what I had just done and why.

Although sometimes I just think I am giving her more and more ammunition for a hearing (either "sanity" or "divorce") sometime in the not-so-distant future, this time she just looked at me, smiled, and said "You are a good daddy."

Cool...