Would You Let a 4 year old Decorate Walls?!?

Seriously. Would you . . . let a four year old ‘decorate’ the walls in his room? Call me crazy (go ahead. you won’t be the first.) but that’s exactly what I did this weekend.

If you read this entire post, I just might convince you to step over to the Crazy Side too.

First of all, let’s back up a bit. A few weeks ago Grandson complained to me that his walls are boring. Not in a “Gramma, I want you to paint something for my walls” kinda way either.

I’m not so crazy that I can’t tell when he’s setting me up, ok?

So I asked him what colors he wanted his walls to be. Red. Orange. Yellow. Pink. Pink? I thought that was a girl’s color. It is, but I still like it. Okay, what else? And black. {oh, yay.}

I’d like to tell you that I’m a really cool, calm grandmother and was fine with his color choices. But in actuality I’m none of those things. Mainly because I was picturing the walls painted those colors. He knows that his grandmother paints walls for kids, so my mental image of walls awash with psychedelic colors seemed logical. To me.

My 4 year old grandson, on the other hand, just wanted some splashes of color, not floor to ceiling I’m gonna be sick colors. Alrighty then. I’m so glad we cleared that up. And the theme? I already knew the answer to that one . . .

Dinosaurs!!!

We started off with a small wood dinosaur from Michael’s. He picked out the paint colors himself, of course. Martha Stewart pearl Mint Chip & Eclipse with a smidge of Obsidian glitter paint.

It’s funny that in an entire aisle of craft paints he went directly to Martha’s new paint line. Ok, maybe it’s not that surprising after all. He is his grandmother’s grandson, ya know?

He was so happy to be painting he even smiled for the camera this time, followed by a healthy dose of 4 year old goofing around.

But then he got down to business.

While the paint dried, I told him I’d sketch some dinosaurs for him that he could color.

Do you have a dinosaur book Gramma can look at?

Nope. We’ll just use Poppy’s (Hubs) computer!

His first attempt at logging in didn’t work, but that didn’t deter him.

One more try and he was already asking me to spell the S-A-U-R part of dinosaur.

Did you know if you double-click the control key a Google Search Bar pops up? Me, neither. Guess who was teaching whom that day?

Voila – dinosaurs!

But he was very particular about which dinosaurs he wanted me to draw for his wall.

Sure, we could’ve just printed them off but it’s much more fun to have Gramma draw them . . . for both of us.

Thank goodness he chose mainly cartoonish figures.

We got into a pretty good rhythm – he’d pick a dinosaur, tell me what it was called, I’d sketch it and he’d color it in. We kept that up for quite a while – longer than any other ‘craft’ project we’ve done together.

Yellow, red, green . . . pink and black. The same colors he mentioned two weeks ago.

Oh, the pink ones are ‘girl’ dinosaurs. Just so you know.

We also hung the wood dinosaur up too.

Sorry, the blinds were closed when I shot this pic so you can’t see how a four year old ‘decorated his walls’.

And there was no way I was gonna take the chance of disturbing this l’il budding artist/decorator. 

I had to leave while he was still sleeping, which is always SO hard, so I added another ‘piece’ to his wall decoration . . .

A nod to the dandelion we picked yesterday and took turns wishing upon.

So! Do you think you’d let your four year old (or 5, 6, 7 y.o.) ‘decorate’ their walls? You can’t imagine how happy it makes them to see ‘their’ colors and ‘their’ artwork.

You don’t have to draw dinosaurs either. You can print any image from Google. When you’re on Google home page, hit ‘Image’ on the menu and the search will give you all images.

Print some off and then create some ‘magic’. And I’m not talking about the drawings. I’m talking about the time spent together creating.

Priceless.