We spent four days at Carl and Kim's house, and I was fascinated to watch Kim in her home with her daughters. She is so effortlessly creative in her own projects (she sewed three skirts while we were visiting!) and it carries over into her parenting approach. I find I often avoid creative endeavors because I don't want the bother of setting up and cleaning up, especially as the kids might only actually create the object or play with the materials with it for ten minutes or so. It just seems like more effort than it's worth. Kim doesn't seem to think that way at all - for instance, she spent 45 minutes boiling the eggs and mixing the dye and getting everything all set up for the kids to decorate Easter eggs, and then cleaned up the mess afterwards. On another day, she set them up on the porch with paints, brushes, water, and tree stumps, and they happily painted away for an hour.
I was definitely making some mental notes about letting go of my own hangups about mess and order, in order to let the kids get dirty and creative more often. Maybe it won't be worth the mess, but you can't know until you try. And it's fun to mark the seasons and holidays with special projects - baking, painting, creating, egg-dyeing, etc.
And so, and so... I've given over bowls and measuring cups and spoons to the children, filling up the bowls with water, and they've been having great fun on our balcony scooping and pouring and making rivers of water to flow over the ledge. And then running downstairs to the basement level to peek out at the waterfall from above, and stepping in the mud.
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