Crossed wires
Sometimes I forget that Little Man doesn’t necessarily understand every word we say. Toddlers (can I say that anymore – he’ll be 4 in October – perhaps preschooler is more appropriate now?), anyway toddlers are quite adept at ignoring anything you say that they don’t understand and just going with the rest of it. But sometimes, like today, it’s not obvious that there’s something they didn’t understand until it’s too late.
We decided that a bit of DIY was in order today, and the sunshine was perfect weather in which to paint our front door. Of course, Little Man, seeing the paint brushes and paint, wanted in on the action, but I didn’t want to let him near the front door itself. I’m a big believer in getting kids involved in DIY and housework at an early age though, so I didn’t want to discourage him. I handed him a tub of white paint and a paint brush, and told him to paint the windowsill. It’s white already so I figured what harm could he do?
Really at this point I should have paid a bit more attention but I was concentrating on painting the door, and I figured I’d touch up the windowsill once he was finished. So you can imagine my surprise when Charlie came running out of the house asking what was going on. Turns out I may have said “windowsill” but Little Man didn’t know what that was, so he went with the next best thing and decided to paint the window instead. Lovely big white steaks of paint all over the glass. That’ll teach me!
*Thankfully I was able to scrub the paint off the window, and teach him what a windowsill was instead and he did a lovely job once he knew what he was aiming for! And in the meantime, we finished the front door and gave it a new lease of life. Quite a change from the fire engine red that it was before!
Lovely colour! And I think you’re very brave to give a 3yo real paint. Good for you!
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I figured that the worst that could happen was that we’d lose a tshirt and a pair of shorts. 🙂
Thats fab! Did you do all the sanding malarkey too? I want to paint my front door, but I think it needs a lot of prep before it gets painted.
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It does need lots of prep. Our door was wrecked from home sanding and bad glossy paint so in the end we got a carpenter in to take it down, sand it back to its original wood (or close enough) and prime it. It was a lot of work – took him about 3/4s of the day.
oh dear! But very, very cute. I am the same about not discouraging them when they offer to help. I ask my 18 month old to put a cardboard container in the green bin, and he puts it in the fridge, so in the fridge it stays because I can’t bear for him to know he got it wrong!
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I really do think its great for them to help even if they make mistakes. I remember reading before that you can’t refuse to let a child help when they are a toddler and then expect them to want to do chores when they are 6 or 7. In fact I wrote about it a couple of years ago: http://mama.ie/start-em-young/
hahahaaaa, brilliant, I’d love to have seen Charlie’s face inside the window when he spotted it 🙂
It was pretty funny! I’d say my own face was fairly priceless as well.
I have to say your carpenter did a great job, and the final color is great! and I am sure your little man felt so important to have such a big task to paint a windowsill! 🙂
In Russia we have a joke : A Little boy was asked to paint windows, after a good while he was back full of paint and asks – Do you want me to paint a frames too??
Any painting job is million percent harder when you have toddlers wanting to help you. You want to be a good mother and let them do it and protect the work you do at the same time = MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Love that Russian joke! That was very nearly an Irish joke too for us!