Gracious Rain

When my kids were little, they positively loved face painting–or in many cases–face drawing.  For our house, the discovery of “Washable Markers” was a fun adventure that led to a ton of…ahem…artistic body art.  Perhaps many of you out there will shutter at the thought of allowing a child to draw on their faces or hands with markers of any kind–but oddly enough, it didn’t bother me….provided they used the correct markers. Problem was–they just kept getting them all mixed up.

I remember falling asleep to my kids “painting” my toenails, only to wake up and find that my entire right leg–from knee to toe–was colored neon pink. Yeah, just one leg…in the dead of summer, when legs tend to be–you know–out there a bit more. Oh, and they used a highlighter—which is NOT a washable marker. Looked like I had some sort of skin condition that certainly needed professional attention.  I pretty much had to just stay home till that stuff wore off, to avoid the gasps and unsolicited medical advice.

Then, there was the time that April wanted to be a kitty for the afternoon. No big deal. She had little felt ears and a black braided yarn tail. The ensemble was nearly complete. All the little dear needed was a black nose. No problem. The Black Licorice marker washes off like a dream. So I drew the sweetest kitty triangle on her pretty little nose and colored it in solid, shiny and black. Perfect. She played all afternoon with yarn balls, meowing and lapping at her food—pretending to be a kitty-cat.

So…do you feel it coming? Yeah, here goes.

That night at bath time to my dismay–no horror, I found that the black didn’t wash off…not even a tiny bit. I found that in my enthusiasm to facilitate free expression in my 4 year old, I’d grabbed the wrong marker. I had grabbed…a faded label…Sharpie.

Now, I’m a good mom, and a good citizen but I wasn’t entirely certain that there wasn’t some law, somewhere, prohibiting people from defacing their own children with permanent ink. And do you want to know exactly how long it takes to get permanent marker off the nose of a small child if you are NOT willing to scrub the skin off at the same time? The answer is…about 4 days.

So we decided that all we could do was make the best of it. At Church, she’d been assigned to give a talk in Primary. We changed it from a short little rendition of Jonah and the Whale, to a stellar performance of Daniel in the Lion’s Den–with a real growling lion. Everyone thought it was the best talk ever and that I was mom-of-the-year for even letting her…dress up.

Little did they know that I was just a wack-job lady that should learn to read labels more closely…and never be left alone with a Sharpie.

Sheesh.

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