My Own Private Artscape

I have no business being awake right now.  I’m tired and a little sore, from three days in a row at the gym (yay, me!).  I have to get up early, of course, and I have a million things to do tomorrow.

There have been a lot of artistic happenings in my house lately.  Unfortunately, I’m none too pleased about them.  See, my sons have taken to caveman expressions of their creativity.  Yep, they’re writing on the walls.  My middle son, Collin, was sad about being punished or something, and he decided to let everyone know by writing with both a Sharpie and a kids’ tattoo marker [read: indelible] on his door.  See the little smiley faces?  Someday, that will be cute.  Someday, after I’ve finished painting over it.  Maybe I should just leave it there for another five years or so, to assure no further damage is done.  When I was putting Collin into bed tonight, he told me Noah had written on Collin’s walls with a brown marker (and I’m thinking, PLEASE let it be a Crayola!).  Our house is a cape cod, with the angled ceilings upstairs.  I painted Collin’s ceiling to look like the sky.  So, when a little boy stands on Collin’s Little Tykes race car bed, he can reach the slope-y ceiling, and he can paint the sky with turd brown, the whole length of the bed.  He can do the bed while he’s at it, too, and some wall as well.  Oh, and by the way?  There is no way in hell that a turd brown dry erase marker will ever come off a flat-painted ceiling.  Not with Lysol wipes.  Not with a Magic Eraser.  Nope...more painting in my future.  I also discovered that Noah found some glitter glue, and decorated Collin’s pillow, the carpet and the wall.  He also found some sand art that someone had created, and dumped that on the carpet.  They emptied the trash can onto the floor, tore everything out of Collin’s closet in search of God-knows-what, and drug half the toys out of his toybox.  Remember what I said, how when you realize it’s quiet, it’s already too late?  Another prime example.  Not to mention that this all took place in the space of THREE MINUTES.  Noah has written on downstairs walls with crayon three times this week.  He also wrote on the floor, and all over his high chair tray, and twice all over the upstairs toilet.  Oh, I cannot wait until they are teenagers.  For now, I think I’m going to keep all art supplies under lock and key.  And man, I can’t wait for this weather to turn, so I can send their little asses outside rather than busy them with creative stuff inside.  There’s a time and a place for art.  The time is when they’re strapped into a high chair and cannot reach a wall (because a Magic Eraser does work well on a high chair), and the place is not on my walls.  Someday, this will all be very humorous to me.  But for now, I’m thinking I should paint my house with blackboard paint and pass out some chalk.