Crayola Crop Circles March 2007

Mashed play dough in the carpet, unidentifiable sticky patches on the kitchen floor, dust bunnies covered with dog fur… these are a few of the messes I face in the Frumpy Zone. But the most prevalent are the various abstract art pieces decorating my Flat Egg Shell White walls. Before I go any further, let me give you Frumpy Tip # 72: Never move into a house with flat paint on the walls! My children just have to sneeze near a wall and it leaves a mark.

My son has been a Pablo Picasso Impersonator, since the age of 20 months, when he realized he could grab a big fat crayon in his tiny fists and make a line longer than he was. After lines, he graduated to his Crop Circle Phase. Gigantic circles would suddenly appear out of nowhere on various walls in the house.

Of course, I was a little preoccupied with our newborn daughter, so I couldn’t keep track of my budding artist who had discovered the power of the pen, the pencil, the marker, and the crayon. Two months after moving into our new house and already it looked like an advertisement for a Sherwin Williams makeover.

After outgrowing crop circles, my mini-Michelangelo took a brief hiatus to focus his artistic ability on actual paper. Twenty boxes of Mr. Clean Magic Erasers later, I breathed a sigh of relief that his wall expressionism was over. Currently, my son seems to be leaving his Abstract Paper Phase and entering another wall phase - Cubism, I think. He started subtly… last week I found an X in the bathroom above the toilet paper roll. A few days later, I found a group of X’s carved on the wall above the bathtub - done with the tip of a toy jet. (This information was voluntarily given by his older sister who is quite supportive of her little brother’s artistic endeavors.)

Yesterday I found the pièce de résistance… a giant trail of life-size X’s down the entire length of the upstairs hallway. I have decided to leave the X’s until my son’s apprentice - my 2 year old daughter who copies everything big brother does - is about five. By then, we can just repaint everything with some of that super shiny glossy stuff.

Wall Saving Ideas from the Frumpy Zone

Paint a 6’x 6’ space with chalk board paint.

Buy butcher paper or bulletin board paper and put on one wall.
It can be easily replaced for hours of artistic fun.

Keep all writing instruments under lock and key and only bring out when you are able to
supervise. (This sounds like a good idea, but I would invariably get distracted by the baby, so I never noticed when my son would wander off to hide his crayons in a secret location.)

Invest in plenty of Mr. Clean Magic Erasers.