pain(t)

"I'm ready to PAINT!!!!!!!!!!"
...were the first words we heard on Saturday at 6:30 am coming from Luke's room. We had promised him he could paint his new room and when we went over to the house on Friday night to do some prep work he was already marching around saying, "Let's open the paint! Let's paint right NOW!" We promised him we'd start first thing the next morning, and he must have tucked that away in some little reptilian part of his brain, because that morning he went from sound sleep to ready-to-paint in what must have been less than 10 seconds.

For lack of a better analogy, painting a room with a toddler is like having a bull in a china shop. He wants to open the paint, dip the brush in, and run across the room painting wildly. He doesn't care about dripping paint, tracking paint with his shoes, elbowing up against parts that have already been painted, or randomly dropping the brush handle-down into the tray full of paint. And when you are letting a toddler help you paint a room, it means that he might be fully committed to the project for about 15 minutes, and any minute he might drop the paintbrush mid-stroke and dart out of the room to go hammer something. So basically I was on full-time Luke-watch and I followed him around saying "NO!" for most of the time we were in the room, and then followed him around doing hammering and digging projects until he decided it was time to paint some more. When Luke finally keeled over from sheer exhaustion at naptime, Dave and I took up painting together and made remarkably improved progress. In the end, we have two freshly painted rooms and one little guy who still has a blue streak in his hair that even a vigorous scrubbing didn't remove.

I have pictures but the camera and the computer are in two different houses at the moment...a theme that seems to keep repeating itself every time we need something urgently. On a related note, I'm sure Luke doesn't understand the full concept of the move but he is surely excited about the new house. I think at this point it's mostly just confusing because we're staying at the old house, but there's no food there, and we keep having to run back to the new house to retrieve things like Luke's bath stuff that we moved and then needed again. Then each time we stop at the new house Luke doesn't want to leave.

Adding to the weirdness is the fact that Luke will be with me as we watch the movers move on Wednesday. Then his school is closed on Thursday, and after a six-day hiatus, he'll go back to school with a new teacher in the mornings. I'm hoping he can handle all of these changes and we'll try not to throw any more at him in the next few weeks.

New Luke-isms to end on:
"A double-drum pan-cacter" - A double-drum compacter, the new steamroller-type vehicle that we're seeing everywhere now that we read about it in Luke's new book
"Oh - What do we have here?" - Discovering a big box of tools that Dave left out