What was I thinking????

As a result of doing "Daddy daycare" for Bella when she's been so sick, now Will is sick. I thought that since Father's Day is coming up, and it is late night at the MudPie (the local paint your own pottery place) and that I would take the children and work on something for Will while also giving him the "gift" of a quiet chance to rest. Funny thing, I called my friend Amy to see if she was interested in joining us up there and she was already on her way there to meet church friends, AND was just one car behind me leaving the neighborhood, Ha, it was really a qoinkydence! (quirky coincidence). So as you read this, imagine it against the backdrop of pretty much every woman I know from church watching on! It was great, Jacob got to work on his plate and I worked on a mug. I set Bella up with brushes, a bowl of water and a tiny bit of paint and gave her a palette tile, she thought she was painting and was happy. I remembered juice boxes, the music was nice, friends stopped to chat (they had the whole back room reserved) and they would comment how nicely the children were working on their projects. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Oh how pride goeth before a fall! In college I developed the talent for knowing when a social situation was about to go downhill. Many years ago, Will and I had a rather different social life than we do now, and we'd be out and at one point I'd nudge him and say, "OK, it's time to go" and sure enough we'd find out later that right after we left something stupid happened, a fight or break up or someone made a fool of themselves on the dance floor. I could pretty accurately judge when it was time to call it a night. Somehow, when it comes to my kids I can't seem to always pick up on those "imminent breakdown" cues. At 7:45 Jacob's plate was done and the mug looked oh so cute with multiple really thin stripes in four shades of blue, I was so proud of it! Instead of wrapping it up while things were still great, I pushed the children a bit, because I really wanted them to add their hand prints to the pottery pieces. It was then that things went downhill. Jacob just flat out refused. Bella was willing but right when I had her little hand covered in paint she grabbed the mug and just smeared it all over with globs of dark brown paint. In retrospect I should have let them fire it that way, it would have been kind of funny. Instead I washed off all my work and we tried three more times, not repainting the whole thing, just trying to get her hand print but every time she would just smear it everywhere. By this time she was tired and miserable and I was frustrated. As I'm cleaning up Bella for the fourth time I hear Jacob over by the sink area telling a church lady , "Wow you sure are are big!" I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Bella decides that the brown paint is chocolate and literally starts licking the palette. It was time to go! So while I'm filling out the forms so we can at least fire Jacob's plate, Bella grabs everything on the checkout counter and is just chunking it all on the floor (ACK!), So Bella is on my hip, I'm filling out the form with one hand and catching falling breakables with the other hand. Meanwhile Jacob is having a meltdown because I told him that when they fire the pieces the colors get brighter, he is losing it, wailing "But Mommy, I don't want the colors to change, I want them to leave it the colors that I picked! Daddy will only like MY colors!" Oh why did I think this would be a good idea??? The thing is, it would have been. If I had just been willing to call it done, let go of my mental picture of how I wanted it be just so, if I had just let good enough be good enough... Eh, I am so human, so not perfect, so much still a work in progress! On the way home Jacob says, "Oh Mommy, look at the beautiful sunset!" and he told his Dad,"Daddy we worked on a big big surprise for you and I can't talk about it, but it's ART!" OK, no hand prints, but raising a child who loves sunsets and gets excited about art, that's the important, real, lasting stuff.