I don’t do much for crafts at home. It’s not that I don’t like crafts–I actually *love* art and crafts of all sorts. But since having kids, my love for crafting has gotten shoved to whatever is behind the back-burner. The backsplash? The back of the pantry? You get the idea… Crafts get shoved aside in favor of activities and outside time. You see, I have 3 boys.
Having 3 boys is a blast, and is every bit as wild and loud as you’re imagining it is. Happily, quietly, making Pinterest-worthy (or even Facebook-worthy) crafts on a rainy day sounds amazing. However, real life is more like: Get out watercolors. Everyone paints for exactly 11 minutes. One boy jumps off his chair, spills his paint water, and/or makes loud farting noises, leading to the other one chasing him around and tackling him in the hallway. In my head, girl-moms get hours of lovely moments. The girls are sitting nicely and painting carefully, asking to glue pretty sequins or bows on their projects. They don’t race to see who can paint the fastest. They don’t muddy up all of the colors to make “poop brown” or paint that “looks like barf.” The yellow stays yellow, and the green, red, and blue stay in their nice circles. They paint adorable pictures and proudly point out the flowers, trees, and birds. Meanwhile, just this week, one of my sons made a birthday card for his cousin, and on the inside drew a stick person wishing her a happy birthday. The stick person didn’t have feet or a nose, but it had a tiny stick-wiener, which he proudly pointed out to me. “That’s his private part hanging down!! He he he he he!”
This is my life with boys.
Against all good judgment, I recently got an idea to make cement stepping stones with the boys’ handprints and footprints on them, and mosaic around the edges. The one crafty-mom DIY mini-tutorial that I barely skimmed said it was super easy! I reasoned that this would be the perfect blend of crafty + messy to keep my boys’ attention. We would have adorable keepsakes with the boys’ little hands and feet to put in my gardens. They would have pretty mosaic around the edges and make great gifts for the grandparents. How hard could it be? Pour cement into a disposable container, squish their feet and hands in, and let them push the mosaic pieces in at the end. Done. Easy-Peasy. Take photos, inspire others with our craftiness.
Well, friends, I’m here to report that as usual, my expectations greatly outpaced reality.
First, I bought the wrong kind of cement, so we had to delay the project by a day. However, the boys were pacified by being allowed to smash up the 3 colorful plates I picked up at Savers. We double-bagged them in paper grocery bags, and then the boys dropped them on the patio and smashed them with rocks with great glee and excitement. Hurray! Look at this awesome idea of mine!! The next day, Husband kindly goes and buys different cement. Great! He mixes it up in a big bucket with a power drill and a special mixer attachment, which the boys think is awesome. When in doubt, use power tools, right? Fantastic! Soon we have our 4 foil pans full of cement, laid out on cardboard in the driveway. Then it begins to rain. No problem for Super Crafty Mom! Clear a spot in the garage and drag it all in. Now onto the fun stuff. Footprints! My oldest goes first. I carefully monitor him stepping in. It looks perfect. We pull his foot out annnnd…. the cement is too wet. It’s gummy and sticks to his foot and stretches into a little peak like meringue. So we wait a bit and re-try.
Several more re-tries over the next hour, and we finally get okay prints of the oldest two boys. Then I try putting the baby’s hand in. He refuses to put his hand in flat and instead grabs deep gobs of wet cement. He instantly starts flinging his cement-filled hand around and in 2 seconds has cement all over both hands, legs, face, and me. Since he’s already messy, I make a few more attempts with the handprints, to zero success. I get one mediocre footprint, and then just give up, wash him off in a bucket outside and take him directly up to the bathtub. I decide that some things might have to wait till he’s older, so we go ahead and start decorating, minus the baby’s handprints. We start pushing the broken plate pieces in, but it turns out that this kind of cement is wrong too–it has a polymer in it, which makes it marshmallowy as it dries. It kind of puffs up, and is just hard to work with. In spite of that, the boys enjoy putting pieces in and only fight a little over green rocks. After about 20 minutes, we call it good enough. Here is the end result:
This is not at all what I had in mind–and that goes for the whole process. I felt like a total mom-failure, who couldn’t even execute these “easy” DIY projects. My perfect idea of a sweet, adorable, clean, neat everything was as ridiculous as the Great Craft Idea reads on paper. As it turns out, 3 boys (ages 7, 4 and 1) + 4 tin pans full of wet cement + broken plates= chaos. This should not have been a surprise.
Maybe next time, better research into a project would eliminate some of the struggle. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe perfectly adorable crafts on rainy days are never a reality for a houseful of boys, or at least not MY boys. But most likely, my ideas of what having girls would be like are just as inaccurate as my idea of how easy it would be to push a baby’s hand cleanly into wet cement. Boys and their shenanigans are my reality. And really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, I got to send this text to my sister-in-law:
I will laugh about that much longer than I would enjoy any perfectly-precious craft, that’s for sure.
Originally published October 2018
