Frottée Fiasco and Other Misfortunes

I did something today I haven't done in quite a while: I tried painting at home. I am in the very beginning stages of a new project and have only begun to prep the canvas with a thin scrub of burnt sienna, the frottée, as it is called, to define and organize the dark areas from the light. With a frottée I didn't have to worry about mixing colors or pulling out a dozen tubes of paint, and I needed at most a brush or two. I figured the minimal supply list would make things a little more conducive to work at home.

Things went well at first. Stacy sat outside with me while the kids played in the yard a few feet offshore. After a while Stacy got tired and went to lay down. At that point, with the lifeguard away, the kiddie sharks descended en masse. Fingers here, sticks and leaves and other garden paraphernalia there. N wanted to touch everything and unscrew all the knobs on my easel. L was much more supportive and very persistent in her offers to help. "I like painting an awful lot. I could help you! I really could!" Eventually she found my tube of burnt sienna and had the top off, waving it around dangerously. It quickly became clear that even stripped down frottée painting was not going to be feasible.

"OK, I'm done," I said. "This is just too..." I didn't want to voice my frustrations in too accusatory a way, so I let the sentence trail off.

"Tricky?" piped up L. "Is it too tricky? I can help with the tricky parts! I'm very good at tricky things!"

In other news this weekend, N executed what must have been his 108^th face-plant since he took up the hobby of walking. Poor kid has a giant goose-egg dead-center in his sizable forehead.

Not to be outdone, L had her own set of bumps and bruises. Much to my chagrin, she has developed a great affinity of late for The Little Mermaid movie and soundtrack. (I made the mistake of letting them listen to it on our roadtrip a couple of weeks ago.) I rarely see her playing by herself now when she isn't humming "up where they walk, up where they run..." Earlier this morning Stacy happened to watch L unobserved playing in our pantry. She had hauled out our step stool and she was standing at the top of it, her back to Stacy, with her arms held out to her sides dramatically.

Up where they play all day in the sun!
Wish I could be, I want to be...

At this point she backed down the stairs, stopped and made a sudden run back up the steps, throwing her arms back out again tres expressively. The orchestra swelled and the waves crashed across her seaside rocky outcrop as she belted out her grand finale:

A part of your world!

Except that the rock must have had a little seaweed on it because as soon as she had borne her soul to the pounding waves, the stool slipped out from under her and she was plunged to the cold, dark abyss of the pantry room floor.

I wasn't there to see it, but I can imagine Stacy's struggle to console her with a straight face.