Too much, too soon

I'm not sure I can cope with summer, especially if it's starting now.

Yesterday, Mabel spent a happy two hours or so playing with a basin of mud at a neighbour's house. (It started as a mini sand box, I'm assured. Now it's a basin of muddy water, and the kids love it more than ever.) By the end, she was happily shoveling sand on a doll's hair for her 3-year-old accomplice to rinse off with the hose. "We're washing the baby's head," they said, clearly making poor baby pay for all those shampooings they had objected to in the past.

Sadly, I didn't get a picture of the baby's mud treatment.

So when I finally brought her home, she went straight into the bath to wash off about an inch of mud.

Today, I was persuaded that the easel should come out of its winter exile in the shed and that I should let Mabel and Dash paint when Dash came home from school. It started out excellently. Mabel painted an underwater volcano.

So did Dash.

Then I looked up from whatever I was doing, as Mabel's sing-song narrative penetrated my thick, thick skull. She was quoting from a particularly fun book we've had from the library recently: "So I take some red... and I paint my head..."

You can see where this is going. Straight back to the bathtub, that's where. Meanwhile, Dash decided to do some finger-painting and ended up with completely blue hands, that dripped up the stairs and all over the basin before being washed off.

The paint is going back in the basement. The easel is going back into the shed. I'm not doing summer.
Not yet.