The cure for the summertime blues

My summertime activity planning energy is waning. With only 3 weeks of summer left, I'm getting very lazy about keeping my kids away from the television. With M turning 9 on Tuesday, I was trying to come up with something to make her day special. Since it is an "odd" year for her, we weren't planning to do a big friend party and with J gone all week on a business trip, I was afraid her birthday was going to be pretty boring. Then we decided to do a play date with our friends, the Hahn girls, and it happened to fall on M's birthday. I was packing up the last of the home school supplies and realized I had a box full of tempera paint. 2 large bottles of almost every available color. I thought, "What am I going to do with all this paint?" Then it hit me: friends coming over, M's birthday, warm summer day: we'll finger paint. But better than that, we'll let them wear their swimming suits and paint whatever is exposed (below the neck). My long-suffering friend Jenny agreed to the experiment and here are the results. (Sorry they aren't in a slide show. Something is up with Picasa today and if I don't post them now, it's not ever going to happen)

This is the 'before' picture:
And this is the 'after'











I know, so cool! I'm usually not the kind of mom that likes to see dirty children, but it was so fun watching them, for a second, I even had thoughts of joining them. I was so proud of my brainstorm but I got a little nervous when we tried to wash them off and found their skin a dull gray color (or in M's a sunburnt red). They weren't too pleased with the cold water coming out of the hose, either, but I was relieved that their skin returned to normal after their baths that night. This was so much fun, we may need to turn it into an annual tradition.