Kicking Up Drywall Dust

I fondly remember Sam helping me paint the master bath when he was around Eva's age.  So as the week of time between the sheet-rocking and wood trim installation in our basement grew quickly to a close and I still hadn't gotten the painting done, I thought painting with the kids might be fun.  After all the floor was unfinished and covered with paper and drywall mud, and there was no woodwork to avoid or tape off.  What a great chance for the kids to "help" with painting.

Sam stripped off his school clothes and put on TT's old Habitat for Humanity Women Build t-shirt, and Eva threw on a gray Obama t-shirt over her pj's, and we handed them each a small roller and set them loose without instruction.  I quickly realized that if we were going to have enough paint to finish the whole room, they needed some instruction... even if a 3-year-old doesn't really follow instruction.  I showed them how to roll only on the top part of the paint tray and how to make sure they rolled all the paint into the wall without leaving long drips and thick lines.  Sam, for the most part, did pretty good (with the exception of whining that he really wanted a big roller like Mommy's rather than the little roller I'd tried to pawn off on him), but Eva glopped paint everywhere and stomped around kicking up drywall mud dust and within ten minutes I was ready for them to be done helping.  Eva wasn't, of course.  And I had one of those parental challenge moments in which I needed to decide to be the parental authority rather than letting her have her way.  She was allowed to paint for 5 more minutes, then we set down the rollers and stripped off the t-shirts and spent 10 minutes scrubbing paint off fingernails and toenails and earlobes and hair.

Thankfully I had other adult help so a ten-minute break didn't slow us down too much and the room got painted... with only about 15 interruptions because they wanted snacks or had to go potty or had fallen down the stairs.  Hey - we got an entire room painted in an evening and no children were hurt in the process, so I think we did damn good.