2%

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. ~Franklin P. Jones

My little Lydia is a joy and 98% of the time she truly is a perfect little angel which is why most of my journal entries about her are so positive. However to keep me humble once in a while she pulls out her 2%. No, I'm not talking about 2% milk (although she does like to drink it). I'm talking about the 2% of the time that she's not an angel and that really tests me and challenges my stamina at becoming the patient mother I want to be. Thursday of this week was one of those 2% days.

I came home from teaching at the college to Lydia burying her head in a pillow and Auntie Em reassuring me that she was just sad because she had been reprimanded. Emily then directed me to the computer screen in the office. Wow! My little artist had taken her sketching to a new level or shall I say new surface, the computer screen. There were pencil marks in circles, squiggles and zig zags all over the screen. I was shocked and sick at the same time. I prayed for patience and suddenly was blessed with the ability to handle everything in a really good way. Lydia and I came and looked at the screen together and after a brief talk she took a time out. While she took a time out I googled how to clean pencil off of your screen. For those of you who are dying to know. If you have a Dell LCD the recommendations seemed to agree that using soapy water on a soft towel or windex sprayed on the towel would do the trick. I tried the soapy water and it seemed to come right off! Hallelujah! Luckily she had done it gently and it had not left any scratches in the screen. After time out I brought Lydia back downstairs and had her help me clean off the rest of the screen. It actually looked better after than it had before, I guess it was in need of a wipe down!

Now the real ironic part of this story is that literally the day before my friend Katey had been at the house and I was bragging about what an incredible little girl Lydia had always been. She had never drawn on the walls or flushed anything down the toilet. I said I sure am lucky! Then not even 24 hours later I eat my words! Why does that always seem to happen?

Moral of this story is that I learned patience and not to brag, Lydia learned to never draw on the computer or anything besides paper for that matter. She also learned that when she does she looses the privilege of watching screens. That's right, no movies or podcasts for a week! And I guess we all learned that soapy water on a rag can take pencil marks off a computer screen!

To end on a more positive note, my daughter is showing great artistic potential these days (when drawing on the appropriate places)! She can write a bunch of letters, draw beautiful circles, zig zags, triangles and sort of squares. However, my favorite is that her pictures of people have evolved from only 2%. They are no longer merely straight lines. As you can see from this picture of Christmas morning, they now have eyes, nose, legs and feet! This is a portrait she drew of Dan and I. Look out Picasso here comes Lydia!