Sand Art Disaster

When we were on the vacation on a vacation, there was a chance to do some art by the pool we were hanging out at. My 6 year old daughter E and 4 year old son C love art. I wanted to take them around to corner to do it, but it took a while to figure out how to get E off of the water slide.

There was about a three story tall waterslide that she kept going up and down on. She is so brave and loves through seeking. Anything that goes fast is really fun for her. I think she must have went down that slide more than 50 times. I can’t imagine how many steps she actually walked up. It’s insane.

Finally, when I was able to call her over, we all went over to the art table. There was a chance to pick a plastic bottle that was shaped like something. They both picked the happy face bottle. The goal was to get different colored sand and fill it to get a variety of layers. My kids didn’t want to mix the layers and so they ended up trying to make it nice and neat.

There wasn’t anything that happened while they were making the sand art. When my kids filled up the bottles to the top with sand, they ended up putting a cap on top. That was that, and we ended up walking back to the bench where we kept our stuff. The kids tossed their sand art on the bench and went back into the pool.

What we didn’t realize was that the sand ended up getting messed up because the bottle wasn’t filled all the way to the top. The sand settled so it was hard to make sure the bottle was completely full. I told the kids that we could go back to the table and try to fix it.

When we got to the table, the kids took more sand and filled the bottles to the top. What was weird was that E had same that kept shifting as we packed the bottle with sand. Her layers got more and more jumbled up, but it didn’t look bad to me. For someone that just climbed up 150 stories to go down the waterslide (3 stories x 50 times down the slide for those following along), she was tired and lost it.

She wanted to redo her art project, but I didn’t want to pay again. I also didn’t want her to feel like things needed to be perfect. I explained that art is something that different people can interpret, and even though some of it was jumbled up, it was still beautiful. The bottom layers were crisp and the top layers were a little bit jumbled. It looked like a great transition, and I explained that to her. And also showed that things didn’t need to be perfect and that was OK.

E wasn’t having it. She was really mad and was starting to throw a tantrum. She ended up crying and saying that she wanted ice cream to make her feel better. That was an immediate red flag to me. I told her that we needed to calm ourselves down. We shouldn’t turn to food or other things to make us feel better, especially ice cream (even though I know it’s totally fine for adults to do this). I didn’t want her to have some type of relationship with food or other things that weren’t normal or healthy. I also wanted her to understand that we need to do a good job of trying to calm ourselves down when we feel strong feelings.

She wasn’t happy about hearing what I had to say at first, but she ended up processing it and calming herself down. I was proud of her for doing that because I knew she was exhausted from the pool. We ended up going back into the pool and just hanging out with everyone. When I got to be pretty late in the afternoon, I ended up getting her the ice cream that she wanted. We also got some ice cream for my best friends kids and just had a good moment hanging out there.

All in all, it was a really good but exhausting time at the pool. I’m glad that the kids had fun and that we had an art souvenir to take home. I’m also glad that I only had two art souvenirs to take home instead of three.