Paint

"but which way would they go forth?
Of course, they went North!"

Even though I call myself the messy mama, when I explain it to people I always mention that I'm still very much in training. I confess that I still have serious issues with mess. That my initiation involved a lovely friend encouraging me to strip my Bean down to his nappy and let him run riot with the paint in their garden.

He painted my feet. The undersides, and the tops. That took a LOT of self control to allow him to do that.

We've come a long way since then but I still have to exercise a huge amount of self control to not let the mess and chaos drive me insane when we do our messy painting.

Steve has been out all day helping various people with various things. And Grandma went home late morning today, and as a distraction for boys from being too sad that she was going we got shoes on and put Bear up in the wrap and headed off to the shop for milk. It worked brilliantly and there were no tears for a change, but Bean is quite happy at the thought that we'll probably be seeing the grandparents again in the not too distant future! He's even started talking about moving house, says that he's already been thinking about it all the days. Interesting.

It's been a day of hard work with the boys though. Bean, in his very early years, had the luxury of having our (mostly) undivided attention. We were able to watch him and observe him and interact with him and not have to make him wait a great deal except for things like cooking which always used to annoy him greatly. Bear however does not have that luxury. And Bean is going through something of a regression at the moment as well, his behaviour is decidedly offbeat at the moment and he gets fixated on certain things which have made him sad and then he seems to get locked in inside himself. It takes him to approach me for a cuddle, and then it takes a very long cuddle with no words from me to let him work things out inside his own head and decided to unlock again. Poor Bear in the meantime though. And that's only the tip of the iceberg with these two at the moment. I might have to blog about it properly, their current behaviours and what I'm trying to do about it to help them (and me) through.

Anyway when we got home I asked if they'd like to do some painting. We had a Very Important Job to do to make Daddy a birthday card for tomorrow, and the birthday card making turned into making daddy a big painting so that is what we did.

And it got ridiculously messy. I do wonder sometimes if it's really all worth it, for the sheer amount of mess and chaos it causes. Including the decorating of various kitchen appliances, and the inevitable flooding to the kitchen when it's clean-up time.

But they enjoyed it. The bathwater was horrid. They didn't want to get out. Or dry. Or dressed.

And then Bear decided that he was Very Very Tired Indeed and Very Cross With It Too and to prove this started throwing things down the stairs while screaming at me as I tried to get the computer to work downstairs to put some stuff on for Bean to keep himself occupied with while I put Bear to bed.

Gaahhhhh.

But daddy came home eventually and saved the day by helping Bean find all the pegs and the hammer for the wooden pegboard, and Bean showed Bear how to hammer the pegs, and Bear spent a happy time thrashing out his need to hit stuff by mostly very accurately repeatedly beating down all the pegs. Except when he hit his fingers. Bean kissed them better.

I do love our boys so so much. I hope we make it through this period relatively unscathed.

And as for the quote at the top of the entry... well, it looks like we'll be moving North next month!