Ricky didn’t care for coloring or crayons until he was probably four. He just wasn’t interested.
Billy only became slightly interested as Ricky started writing for school. At the time, I thought he was TOTALLY into coloring.
I was wrong.
I then had Rusty. Rusty is a coloring fool. Before he turned two, we had some wall coloring issues. I thought it was awful. I thought no child had ever colored on the walls as much as mine. I wanted to pull my hair out and never allow him to touch another crayon.
I was wrong.
Tommy. Ah, sweet Tommy. His happy dance when you come home makes your heart melt. Then you turn around and see this …
Walk a little farther into the house and see this …
Or this …
Or this …
Sigh. Or this …
Those pictures cover three rooms and a hall that Tommy tagged in about 15 minutes while I was doing some housework and assumed he was in the kitchen coloring nicely with Rusty. I wish I could say that was the worst of it. One day, black crayon met our wall all the way up the stairs and down the hall to our bedroom.
We’ve had windows, TVs, tile, brothers all colored on by this delightful one year old.
Put the crayons out of his reach, you say. Watch him like a hawk, you say. So much easier said than done when the two year old’s favorite activity is coloring.
We’ve made progress. Magic Erasers work well to remove the crayon, but they can take off the finish (don’t look too closely at our hall’s paint). WD-40 works even better but can leave a little greasy residue. Making the two year old color on the bar instead of the table only works so well since he drops crayons and Tommy pounces on them.
My current technique is just not cleaning the crayon off the wall. I could make Tommy do the cleaning, but he thinks that is almost as fun as drawing on the wall in the first place and he just colors on it again so he can clean it…again. If I just leave the crayon marks where they are, he seems happy and doesn’t add to it. I just think of it as artwork. Some people pay lots of money for that abstract stuff …