The Color Purple No More

Will is forever pulling out the play-doh and creating things. He especially likes to make snakes, for no reason other than they are easy to make. He has even taken over some my kitchen utensils, including my rolling pin. He doesn't care what color play-doh he uses as long as it is easily squished and poked. Once it's been around awhile the play-doh gets too hard for him to make anything but crumbs.

We recently discarded all of our old crumbly play-doh, and brought out four new containers. They were beautiful colors, colors probably wasted on a 3-year-old boy. Bright Purple. Cookie Monster Blue. Lime Green. Orange-Yellow. Katherine immediately snapped up the containers of purple and blue and, after playing with them for short time, hid them out of Will's reach. Nice. Will asked for the purple but had to be satisfied with the green and orange. He played with it beautifully and squished the colors together until they became one...a nice pukey green. Lovely.

A day or two later, Katherine made the mistake of playing with the purple and blue and leaving them for me to clean up. Not caring who played with which colors, I put them all away in the play-doh drawer. Yes, we have a play-doh drawer...nothing but play-doh, cookie cutters, and knives. To all of his sisters' dismay, the next day Will took out the beautiful colors and mixed them into a nice big lump with the pukey green that he had already created. No more clean purple play-doh. It was a sad, sad day...for Katherine. Will, on the other hand, now has twice as much play-doh at his disposal!

Will's creativity doesn't end with the play-doh drawer. He loves crayons, and markers, too. This evening just before bed, Will was carefully coloring a picture placemat. He was being so quiet...this is where our radar should have been going crazy. He was coloring in the hallway right outside the computer room, where David and I were talking. I looked out to check on him, only to discover that he had left the crayons for a more exciting instrument of color...a fuschia Mr. Sketch marker. Not only that, he wasn't limiting himself to the paper anymore either...he'd moved on to the carpet! Yes, the used-to-be tan-now-faintly-pink carpet. Looking over the scene, it was clear what had happened. Will had started out using the marker on the paper, and because he left it on the paper too long, the marker seeped through onto the carpet. That must have looked really pretty, or at least very different, because from there he drew swooping lines around the many dots. I should have taken a picture of his creation to save for later - like when he has his own 3-year-old. Instead, I calmly took the marker away and reminded him to color on the paper.

Making art must be very tiring, because Will went right to bed without a fuss while I attempted to save the carpet. Mission impossible.