Tire painting
Thursday April 16th 2009, 4:14 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

imgp7454To answer Birdy–here’s my been there done that:

My kids once got into not the food coloring but the fabric paint.  Whichever child it was never got caught. But nothing I could do could clean the green (Lorelei would be so proud) fingerpainted smears off the front of the white bathroom cabinet.

I threw all the tubes out after that–I didn’t ever use the stuff anyway and it clearly wasn’t worth the hazard to my house.  Replacing that cabinet when we remodeled was simply the only way we found to clean up that mess that worked.

So. One of Sam’s first-grade friends was moving away and gave her a box of stuff including, you guessed it, a tube of fabric paint.  In bright red.   I said no, and tossed it straight in the trash.

The trashmen somehow dropped it out of there while going about their job. I found this out when I pulled into my driveway later that day, and–picture this.  With my deafness. Inside my car. With the motor still on.  And the windows up. I HEARD that four ounce tube explode when the tire hit it!

Bright red, and splattered in tiny droplets all across the front of the house; Jackson Pollack would be so proud.

I was wearing a brand new outfit I very much liked. Oh well. I ran into the house at top speed for a wet towel, knowing I didn’t have time to change, and then scrubbed as fast as I could, hoping hard not to have to have my entire house repainted.

My outfit was toast.  Paint from the towel had swiped onto it, Cat-in-the-Hat style, but that was small potatoes to the could-have-beens.  One last drop was left on the house, dried hard before I could get to it, but it was tiny. There were a few red spots on the otherwise-berryless male holly bush.

I got off easy that time.

(Suddenly thinking, as the daughter of a modern art dealer, gee, I could set off a whole artistic trend with this post, couldn’t I?)


18 Comments so far
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It must be some sort of initiation to parenthood to have paint or color somewhere that it’s not suppose to be. My daughter left a purple crayon by the heat duck and it melted just enough to stain the brand new carpeting to the brand new house.

Comment by Joansie 04.16.09 @ 5:40 pm

I think the phrase “never a dull moment” actually was invented to describe your life. 🙂

Comment by karin 04.16.09 @ 5:51 pm

That’s why,a few years ago when my two were smaller and a lot messier,no art supply came into the house that didn’t have the word WASHABLE on it!!!

Comment by Kim(with kids) 04.16.09 @ 6:00 pm

For us, it was red Kool Aid on a brand-new grey carpet. I knew LONG before the current craze that you could dye yarn with Kool Aid! How did I get rid of it? Sold the house!

Comment by Barbara-Kay 04.16.09 @ 7:44 pm

Not having any young kids of my own, I dorn’t have any similar stories to report. However, my cockatiel Pepper does her best to make up for it. There’s a reason that Amalie nicknamed her Miss poopsalot.

Today’s funny:
A man who lived alone decided he wanted a pet, so he went to a pet store.  He looked around, but could not make up his mind, so the store owner suggested a parrot he had at a special price.  “Does it talk? inquired the man.  “Oh, yes,” he was assured, “the bird can certainly talk.”  Thinking the parrot would be good company, the man bought the bird and took it home.

Could it talk?  Good grief, yes!  This parrot had the foulest, most obscene language the man had ever heard!  It would not shut up.  And its behavior was no better, flying around and crashing into things, chewing on virtually everything, and generally being a nuisance.  After a couple of days of this the man could no longer stand it.  He grabbed the bird and threw it into the freezer.

Now the parrot spewed out language that would make a sailor blush.  Then after several minutes there was complete silence.  Nothing.  Well the man didn’t really intend to freeze the bird, so he opened the freezer door.  The parrot very gently stepped out onto his hand , and said, “I’m sorry for my poor behavior, and I apologize for my bad language.  I promise I will never do that again.  May I ask what the chicken did?”

Comment by Don Meyer 04.16.09 @ 8:15 pm

Pollock lived and died just up the street from me – ‘course I was only 3 when he died — 😉

Comment by rho 04.16.09 @ 10:10 pm

HAHAHAHAHAHA! I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time but you got a great story out of the mess.

Comment by LynnM 04.17.09 @ 12:29 am

Boy am I glad the only destructive “thing” in the house when my son was little was the cat and she just clawed everything she could.

Comment by Danielle from SW MO 04.17.09 @ 4:07 am

I’m sure every parent has a paint story. My daughter was three when she saw Daddy polishing his BLACK shoes and felt the urge to take care of her brand new, pure white, tiny-babysized Nike sneakers. Daddy forgot to hide the shoe polish when he was finished. YEP! You guessed it!

Comment by Jody M 04.17.09 @ 5:14 am

What a story! The title had me wondering where this was going…

Comment by Channon 04.17.09 @ 6:25 am

Cat in the Hat was exactly what I was picturing!

Comment by Momo Fali 04.17.09 @ 7:28 am

My kids are 4 and we still don’t use things that aren’t washable! Your exploding paint and cleaning the mess that insued does sound very Suessian…were you rhyming at the time too :0)

Comment by TripletMom 04.17.09 @ 8:04 am

A new master bedroom had just been built onto my childhood home. My parents had beautiful oak doors installed on the closet that Dad was intending in stain and varnish — until my baby sister colored all over them with my Mom’s scarlet lipstick. It took many, many coats of white paint to cover that lipstick.

Comment by wunx~ 04.17.09 @ 10:06 am

In the Bay Area, you probably could have sold your whole house as some kind of modern art piece 😉

Comment by Jocelyn 04.17.09 @ 10:38 am

I agree, you might be on to something. What would you call it? Tire splash? hahaha
I can’t believe it reappeared in such a way, funny how that happens.

Comment by Alicia 04.17.09 @ 12:03 pm

You make me feel so much better about my kids — there’s a lot of “whoever did it never got caught” around this house.

Comment by Michelle 04.17.09 @ 5:13 pm

If I see any bespattered houses. I’ll know who should get the inpirational credit!

Comment by Carol 04.19.09 @ 8:39 am

Murphy’s Law you know ;P. Kids seem to find whatever it is that you don’t want them to have and always when you aren’t looking ;P.

Comment by LDSVenus 04.19.09 @ 2:05 pm



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