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Just call me the next “Octo-Mom”

Two year-olds will only allow you to be under the weather for a finite amount of time. Like an afternoon. Even the offer of unlimited Disney Channel and/or Sprout for a day loses its appeal after a couple of hours when you are a mere twenty-nine months old. No matter how long you suggest playing “nap with Mommy,” the call of the wild is too strong to coerce a full day of snuggling.

Thank God for modern medicine. And YouTube.

No, I didn’t set Princess lose on the net – although she probably could surf just fine considering she’s a master of her iPod Touch.

I found a video craft project online that I thought munchkin might like to do and showed it to her.

“oooooOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH. Purpool Opupupa!”

Sold.

She watched it start to finish. The full 7 minutes of it. It seemed pretty straight forward so I took a leap of faith that she grasped the whole concept and that we were going to make Octopus. Or Octopi. I guess that’s the plural.

“Do you want to make an Octopus?”
“Yes!”
“What color Octopus do you want to make?”
“PINK! PINK OPUPUPA!”
Seriously, why did I even bother asking what color? I guess the black tutu request still burns in my memory…

All we needed were toilet paper tubes (check), toilet paper (of course), paint, eyes and a pen. I knew I had pink paint, but this is Princess we’re talking about. And she uses paint like a Cowboys fan drinks beer. That would be in excess for those of you living in a football depraved state. But I was also quite confident I was lacking in the googly eye department. So we were off to Michaels for more supplies.

Princess was thoroughly enthralled with the idea of making Octopus, in fact confirming this notion by bringing along the toilet paper rolls in the car and chatting in her two-year old way of broken conversation about it the whole drive there. She also informed me that she would be making not only a PINK octopus, but also a YELLOW one, and a GREEN one. And as my shopping list was growing by the driving mile, I was wondering why I forgot my weekly coupon for Michaels on the counter as I clearly was about to invest in a rainbow of acrylic paint.

We tackled the list in pretty good time since she stayed on task and in basket throughout the store. On the way home, however she fell asleep nearly mid “sentence” and I seized the opportunity to work ahead a little bit. I stuffed the ends of the tubes and painted the base coat of white paint and had it dry by the time she woke up. BTW, I don’t have a good suggestion on what else to stuff them with. I wasn’t thrilled with the toilet paper “head.” If I did it again I might try aluminum foil or newspaper.

When Princess graced us with her presence again, rubbing her eyes, she sweetly explained to her Daddy who was still growling about the water heater that we had to have installed moments earlier (yes, on a Sunday, yes on a holiday weekend, cha ching, cha ching) that she was going to make Opupupa and showed him her paint and bag of eyeballs and off she skipped to the kitchen to get started.

After covering everything I thought was in the line of fire (I was wrong) I found it worked easiest for me to hold the tubes with my hand inside it and to turn it for her to paint.

Okay right, I confess. “Easiest” would have been to set her loose with the paint and the tube and told her to have at it. But let’s face it, that would have been a colossal mess. A large probably contained mess that I could have rolled up and thrown in the trash and washed off her hands and clothes I suppose, but without stifling her technique, I think we had a good system going this way and she didn’t seem to mind.

With an older child, perhaps you could do this project all in one sitting. However Princess has no concept of “too much” and the amount of paint covering the tubes was, we’ll just say significant, so ours had to dry overnight. (Mother’s intuition was correct in purchasing the additional paint pre-project start. I’m just sayin’.)

Over breakfast the next morning, Princess picked out the eyes she wanted on her little school of Octopi and glued them on. Then she carefully drew on their mouths – some cascading all the way down the tube. I’d say those were channeling her terrible two’s moments much like Munch’s painting “The Scream.” I cut the legs on the little sea creatures and curled them for her to complete the effect.

Second confession. I was seriously hoping that she would forget about painting the tips of the feet. But she didn’t. Apparently my little artist is a stickler for details and she wanted to paint them too. So we did using the same team technique as before.

Here’s how they turned out. Absolutely precious.

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