This past weekend my daughter went to a birthday party where the activity was to make a mask out of clay. My daughter is almost four, while the party was for a bunch of seven year-olds (we’re friends with the family so she was invited), and she couldn’t do this on her own, so I had to help out. (It turned out that many of the seven year-olds also couldn’t soften the clay/shape it/cut it/attached parts to it on their own, but that’s not the point.)

After I helped my daughter get her huge chunk of clay into a mask that did actually look like a cat, it was time to paint it. My daughter jumped to it and as you can imagine, the colors were all over the place, the red from the mouth was running into the face, the brown from the nose was running into the mouth, and when she took a huge brush of yellow (to do the eyes, mommy!) it splattered all over the blue background color.

As I was watching her do this, I was having an internal debate. I can summarize it like this: Read the rest of this entry »