Painting festively

Looks it's the cheesy mommy said to smile smile...it cracks me up

We have a tradition. The day after Thanksgiving we go over to Jesi's and the girls paint ornaments. Granted, this isn't a long standing tradition or anything but it's a lot of fun and the girls really enjoy it. I think we're not so secretly hoping that this will go on for years and years to come and we'll be able to show their progression in life via their painting skills. Or something.

Jesi was even cool enough, in the days leading up to the big day, have the girls help her make salt dough ornaments that they would then paint.

No it's not your imagination, her eyes don't look well.

Well this year we hit a snag. Alex wasn't well. In fact she'd been battling some kind of eye thing for just over 2 weeks by this point and had woken up on black Friday with a swollen, red and icky eye. She went to the doctor later that day but we figured it was best to err on the side of caution for this one and not expose other kids to whatever may be going on. **side note: turns out it is and was and will continue to be a clogged tear duct. But she'll have surgery to fix both of them on January 21, 2011. More on that to come as the day approaches** 


Not to be one to break a promise to my kid, even if she isn't fully aware of said promise, we ventured out to get paint and maybe a few other things. Wooden ornaments in hand and paint at the ready it begun. This is just the sort of project Jason hates. It's messy and un structured and plain ole madness. But Alex had fun.

So did I.

She doesn't quite understand about washing off the brush between colors...or at all. She doesn't get staying in the lines or making things look that way they're supposed to. And she doesn't get that maybe we should wait until the paint is dry before adding glitter or gem things.

But she does gets that arts and crafts are fun. And that the shapes were a 'ginger-man', 'twee', 'snowman' and 'poing-poings' and that she loved coloring them in. We'd thought of giving these little disasters to the grandparents with this years installment of 'The book of Alex' but I'm not so sure. She loves playing with them and adding things to them and taking things away. We at some point put goggly eyes on the ornaments..yeah they didn't last long.

So our ornaments this year are wooden and 2 dimensional and not salt dough that Alex made herself. But we still had fun and they and she are still adorable. Here's to next years painting fiasco. Hopefully we'll have lots of practice between now and then.