let me start by stating our household has a long history with food coloring. i made darla food color ice cubes to go in her baths about a year ago and well, we haven’t been able to have a week that goes by without a tinted bath since. if you can avoid starting this practice then you are smarter than i and deserve 10 parenting points.

^^^evidence^^^

so we decided to dye our eggs yesterday – we dyed them without the shells this year because darla eats a dozen boiled eggs a week. that is an exaggeration. an EGGSageration if you will. anyway…

this activity:

slowly devolved to this:

and then this:

this:

and finally this:

i think the breakdown came somewhere in between her asking “mom, can i paint my body?” and me answering “YES.”

It was an allowance that required a lot of time and soap to undo. I can’t say that i recommend it but on the other hand…it was a whole lot of hilarious. to me at least. i think hubster was a little less amused. i honestly asked him if we could leave her that way forever.

but i can’t help but hope that by responding positively to these crazy artistic whims of hers that i’ll be instilling some confidence in her that her own ideas are good ones. i’m hoping she’ll be learning something about support and believing in her inspirations. i hope. i’m hoping we’ll continue to experiment with her own independence and enacting her will on her world. i’m hoping this freedom will build her esteem and sense of self.

so that when all her peers are experimenting with mind altering drugs in high school because they have no other control over the decisions in their lives that she, MY daughter, will simply be experimenting with body paint.

or drugs AND body paint which is still way more ambitious than just drugs, right?

anyway, it turns out food dye doesn’t come completely off. i just dropped her off at school without so much as one word of explanation about her purple hands and feet.

they love me there. they do.