This is a lesson in the subtle practice of subtlety. Or perhaps how to be nonchalant. Or perhaps how not to get in trouble when you paint the mirror with toothpaste.
My boys are really, really bad at squeezing out toothpaste onto their toothbrushes. What inevitably happens when we remind them to brush their teeth every night (because they somehow forget it has to happen every night) is that they will either squeeze too much and eat the excess (which is why we no longer buy strawberry toothpaste. Eating toothpaste just isn’t the same when your mouth is burning minty fresh.) or they’ll squeeze too much and use the rest for mirror art.
See Exhibit A above.
For a while I solved this problem by squeezing out toothpaste on five toothbrushes myself and letting them know their toothbrushes were ready for toothbrushing. At least until the second day when I tripped over the stool someone had put right up next to the door and I caught myself on the counter and I couldn’t pull my hands back off. Someone had painted the counter with toothpaste, and it had turned to glue. There were two flies caught and held in it.
Toothpaste-smeared mirrors are better than toothpaste-sticky counters, so I let them have at it.
There aren’t many kinds of art I dislike, but toothpaste art is one of them. Probably the only one, come to think of it. Mostly because it’s virtually impossible to get toothpaste off the mirror in one good swipe. I don’t have a whole lot of time to clean my house, so one good swipe is usually all I have. But toothpaste is like, come on, guys, let’s give her a hard time and have a little fun at the same time by exploring ALL THE INCHES OF THIS MIRROR. And then on swipe two it hides in the mirror’s corners like minty webs waiting to catch the gnats hanging out by the toilet for some reason, probably because this is a boy’s bathroom, and then on the third swipe it finally realizes it’s beaten and I’m not giving up.
Usually, when this type of art shows up on the mirrors, the artist doesn’t have the foresight to sign his name, but this time someone was really proud of what he’d done. This art was proudly drawn by the son we call Asa.
Now he is cleaning the mirror until it shines, which is much better than it looked before, so I guess I should thank him for breaking the rules and using toothpaste to practice his letters.
This is how we teach lessons in our house.
And I’m sure next time he thinks about painting his artful flourishes across a mirror with toothpaste he’ll think twice and remember how long it took him to clean off this artwork and how his friends were knocking on the door and he couldn’t go outside with them until the mirror passed Daddy’s inspection.
Or maybe he’ll just leave off his name. Which, in all honesty, is what I would do.
