Lesson learned... "the incident"

Lesson learned by 4 year old - never, ever do it again...

Lesson learned by parents - never assume that quiet, indepedent play time by the girls means all is well...

Friday night, Ryan and I were in the kitchen finishing up dinner, and talking about our to-do list for Taylor's birthday party the next night. We kept mentioning how it was nice that the girls were playing so well together in Taylor's room (or so we thought). We kept hearing giggles and talking.

And then, after about 5-10 minutes passed, Camryn walked into the living room. Only she didn't come from Taylor's room. She came from the way of our master bedroom. I looked at her face and saw black lines were drawn on her. She also had black colored all over her feet and hands.

I knew immediately what it was, and ran past her into our master bathroom, and this is what I saw.

I was speechless.
(Cam's reaction was how I was feeling inside. You can't see it very well, but there was black on her shirt, jeans, face, hands, feet.)

Walls, cupboards, carpet, clothing, kids, counters, rugs... all drawn on with black eyeliner. It was everywhere. There was also an entire box of dixie cups crumpled up in the sink with water slowly trickling, and the carpet was damp throughout the bathroom area and walk-in closet.

All I could say was 'oh my word'.

Taylor KNEW she had done wrong, she could feel the disappointment. She literally shrunk in front of me as I just looked at her. With THAT look.
Scrubbing with my toothbrush.

2 hours later, after scrubbing the walls with a toothbrush and toothpaste (an idea we got from google that worked well!), and a carpet cleaner rental, we got most of the black cleaned up. Our carpet will always show evidence of this incident.

Lesson learned.