Painting and Day 2

I just finished reading this awesome book last weekend.

I completely loved it.

It was a great life/parenting book.

Her tone was not condescending, 

and I really enjoyed all the little exercises she did throughout the book.

One of the challenges was basically

listing 5 creative activities you would like to do with your child and what is hindering you from doing it.

(She had a nice motivational quote and bigger purpose and stuff too...just that's what I remember. Haha)

Anyway, I had written down finger painting.

I thought it would be so much fun.

I found some finger paint at one of Boston's Targets on Black Friday.

(I couldn't find any here in Princeton, so needless to say, I was thrilled.)

While Madeleine was sleeping I set everything up.

I was so excited.

The only thing was...she wasn't.

:)

The bottles of paint were interesting, along with the little shiny thing that I had to peel off to get the paint off,

but the actual paint, nope.

She poked it, wrinkled her nose, and started chewing on the bottle of paint.

I was not going to give up that easily.

I coated both her hands in paint.

She looked at them and wiped them on her pants.

Finally, I was able to convince her that paper made a cool sound.

So I put paint on her hands while she sat there crinkling it.

I took that as a win. :)

The clean up?

Oh man, paint was EVERYwhere.

I thought Matt was going to kill me.

I put her in the bathroom, but she touched everything on the way there...and everything in the bathroom.

I looked at my now green toilet and wiped it down.

The thing was where I wiped looked cleaner than the rest of the toilet.

It quickly led to the whole bathroom getting cleaned.

And every other surface and room that this little body touched.

But look at the art she made.

So cute right?

It's actually not her first painting.

This one was.

I think the whole thing was pretty successful.

Hopefully next time she gets more into the whole paint thing.

As for the photo of the day...

that was a bit of an ordeal.

The theme for today was "Traditions".

Matt and I don't have any traditions yet.

Last year the only thing we did on Christmas was eat at Outback.

That's not really anything I want to repeat this year.

We didn't even put up a tree.

Celebrating Hanukkah isn't usually one of our traditions,

 but the Hawkers gave us a menorah when we saw them at Thanksgiving.

And things don't get much more traditional than Jewish traditions.

The one tradition that we did have was eating this ice cream.

I was all ready to go and get it, but when we called Coldstone, they informed us they stopped making it.

(After 10 years!!!!!! Tradition destroyers...)

That led me to writing angry emails to Coldstone all afternoon, 

before eating my emotions with my family's traditional chicken enchiladas.

They are good.

Oh well, this year my goal was to start setting traditions for each holiday.

I'm hoping next year we'll have some actual traditions to share.