Thursday, October 09, 2008

Paint Me Exasperated!

Well, I think it's official, I am now completely and certifiably insane. If you needed any more proof then I submit to you the following incident that happened this week...

Running errands with two kids is always an (ahem) "adventure." And now that Noah's started walking it's even more fun. I mean, it was a bit difficult before but at least I knew that the baby was right there with me, in the stroller or shopping cart, and I only had one rambunctious rambler to keep an eye on. It's probably not politically correct to say it, but it was kind of nice having one kid who was too young to move. But now, with two very active and busy kids it's double trouble! It's like trying to run errands with a small troupe of monkeys or something. Seriously, despite the fact he's now mobile the one is always clinging to my pant leg or wanting to be held and hang off of me. And the other one is always roving around, getting into things, whining, or both at the same time. You get the picture. It makes an errand that should have taken 5 minutes take at least a half an hour.

All that's pretty standard for any mom though. But here's the part where I lose my mind. Knowing full well what it's like to take two young kids into the store, I actually took them with me to try and choose....paint! Oy vey! Let me tell you... For starters, I went in there thinking it would be a quick in and out job since I had some fabric I wanted them to match. You know, since all the stores seem to be offering to match colors. Come to find out, as the store clerk dryly informed me, that they "can't match fabric" since it has threads of several colors in it and that apparently confuses the computer. (Aaaargh!) So, the gal hands me the fan deck of 60 trillion colors and tells me she's sure I can find the right color somewhere in there. Figuring I came for paint and by golly I was going to get some I sat down determindly to find my perfect hue. Well, matching colors can be a tricky thing, as anyone who has tried to do it well knows. Not only is it virtually impossible to really know what the color will look like in your space from a tiny paint chip stuck up on the wall but because, it gets a bit confusing when faced with 60 trillion colors all at once. Even something seemingly "safe" and innocuous as picking a bland beige can be trecherous since there's a pinky shaded beige, a more brown beige, a grayer beige, a greenish beige, a more yellow beige, an orangish beige, and so on. And all of them just slightly different enough to make a person's head start to spin. And of course, all of them not *quite* the same as my sample. So there I was, knee deep in paint chips and really concentrating and squinting at the samples, willing one of them to match while my kids are.... oh wait, I brought the kids. Where are the kids? Oh there they are, in the row straight ahead steadily throwing a stack of 50 or so plastic paint trays into the middle of the aisle, making an impressive pile really.

"Bree!" I say. "Please stack all those back up and put them back on the shelf. They belong to the store not to us."
"Okay Mom!" she says obligingly and starts stacking.

Back I go squinting at paint samples. After a minute I look back up to check on the kids again. Now that they've cleaned up the paint trays, they've found a stack of cardboard paint buckets that they're pulling apart one by one and doggedly making a pile in the middle of the aisle.

"Brianna, can you please help your brother clean that up?" I say, "The people who work here like to keep the store clean so pick up."
"Okay Mom!" she says and starts stacking them all back up.

I glance down at my paint chips and when I look back up I see that now Noah has grabbed a medium sized cardboard bucket and put it over his head like a hat and it comes far enough down that it's covered his eyes. He's laughing and staggering around the aisle with his hands out in front of him. This makes Bree laugh and decide to join in so she grabs the bigger size and puts on her own "helmet."

"All right you two. Those are very nice hats you have but you can't see and I'm afraid you'll fall so please put them back okay?"
"Okay Mom!" Bree says.

By this point, despite the fact that I've had to have some sort of child chaos intervention every few minutes I've narrowed my paint choices down to two. Hmm... which would be better? My thoughts are interuppted by loud banging. Now both children have each grabbed two of the tiny paint sample cans and are banging them together to make music.

"That's very loud!" I tell them. "Why don't you play a quieter game..."
"Okay Mom!" Bree says. Then her and Noah start stacking all the small sample cans of paint from a low child-height shelf onto the table they have for poor idiots to sit at while trying to choose a paint color. After they have them all stacked I'm still wavering between my two choices and I say, "Okay! Now let's move them all back from the table to the shelf again. That's a good game!"
"Okay Mom!" Bree says and they start shuffling back and forth putting them back, although, I do beleive they were in order by color before we got there.

Finally, I pick my color. I ask the gal at the counter to mix it for me. Meanwhile, the kids decide to play a very loud shout and laugh hysterically while peeking at each other from behind a round display game. I ignore them.

Then at last, the paint is mixed and I feel like my head is going to explode. I round up the kids and take my perfect color home, leaving somewhat of a wrecked paint section behind me. But really, it could have been worse. Still, I'm pretty sure the paint clerk hates me on site.

And guess what? I took that color, painted a big old swatch on my wall and.... I hate it! Looks totally different in my house.

So, lesson for the day, kids can be frustrating even when they're really not being bad they're just being, well, kids. And picking a paint color can be VERY frustrating. If you haven't tried it yet, I don't recommend mixing the two...you may have to dose yourself with tranquilizers afterwards.

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