The seemingly unforeseeable

We trundled off to playgroup today - just for something different, it was freezing out after all. When we arrived Mister and Missy Mopps went straight for the water table as they do every time.

The water table is a tub of water on legs with a scraping of the wet stuff at the bottom; just enough to gather a little into a small jug if dragged along the tub floor. The water is then poured into a container with a hole in the bottom, which makes a wheel spin around.....but this blog isn't really about the water table, it is about paint.

We were at the water table when one of the coordinators wandered over to inform us of a 'foot painting' opportunity over in the far corner of the playgroup hall. "Okay....thanks," I hesitantly replied.

A little later, a second coordinator came over. She too inform us of the foot painting. I glanced over at the foot painting area; it was as I had feared it to be - a long piece of butchers paper, surrounded by some trays of paint (if you can call three pieces of tin foil with paint slopped in the middle, 'paint trays'). At the end of the butchers paper was a bowl of water of questionable stability, presumably placed there to wash one's feet afterward.

"Do you want to do a foot painting?", I asked Mister in a bored tone, so as not to excite his imagination too much.

"No!", came the reply, much to my relief. I looked at the coordinator and shrugged, "he doesn't want to do it. Sorry". She wasn't heartbroken, believe me.

Later into the session, I was playing cars with Mister and Missy Mopps. Many of the other women chatted together, content that their children had settled enough to go play with whatever took their fancy. However..... this satisfying mid-session calm was about to be brought to an abrupt halt!

A woman who brought her neighbour's child to the group, gasped upon noticing that the fourteen month old was covered in bright orange and blue paint - all eyes were momentarily on the woman and child as she blurted "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

Bracing ourselves for what we might see next, the room slowly turned and we lifted our eyes toward the foot painting area (hee hee!).

Evidence demonstrated that the little girl had indeed traipsed through the paints and had contributed her own set of prints to the masterpiece. But she did not stop there - no sirree!

She had sat in the paint, and stomped around the perimetre of the butchers paper, all over the wooden floor.

She had also toppled the precarious looking bowl of water. The grayish river fully soaking one end of the painting and spilling under the locked cupboard door running alongside it.

To top it off, she then managed to make she squelchy way around the room with her paint sodden feet, to where she now stood, in front of a throng of mouth gaping caregivers.

The foot painting was a write off. It was seen scrunched and discarded in the corner of the room after the rest of us grabbed towels to mop up the water or scrub paint off the floor, while the horrified caregiver scrubbed the little girl - who no doubt, had a lovely time!!!!

It was a priceless moment really, but why no one could have foreseen such an incident occurring between a room full of 0-5 year olds and a largely unsupervised paint project, is beyond me.