4 Years = 4 Minutes

08.19.07

 

It takes two… adults, that is.  For paper mache.  Heck, I can’t even spell it by myself. 

 

My daughter likes to say, “Four year olds can do a lot of things all by themselves, can’t they?”  Like fastening and unfastening overalls.  Like buckling their own seat belts.  Like pouring their own milk – at least if it the carton isn’t too full.

 

She was desperate to have a piñata at her birthday party.  A piñata in the shape of the number 4.  I’m pretty sure she got that idea from a little friend who had one shaped like a 6 at his birthday.  I thought it was a fun idea, but remembered how hard it was to break the number 6, and how much candy was inside it.  I didn’t have a clue where to buy a piñata in the shape of a special number 4.  Then a brainstorm.  Hey, if we made it ourselves it would be smaller (and thus hold less candy) and thinner (thus being easier to break). 

 

Sometimes I’m pretty deep into a project before I recognize it was BAD IDEA.  I wish the light bulb in mybrain were more like a stoplight, with green for “fantastic!,”  yellow for “caution, you might want to think this through,” and red for “what kind of an idiot are you, anyway?”  This could save me  a lot of aggravation.

 

Making a piñata in the shape of a number 4 with paper mache doesn’t seem like all that big a deal.  I mean, we did it in grade school, right?  1 teacher to 30 kids.  It couldn’t be that awful.  And besides, 4 year olds are great little helpers. 

 

I distinctly remember having this last thought.  4 year olds are great little helpers.  It’ll be a fun mother/daughter project.  We’ll enjoy each other and laugh as we make a little mess (I did have the presence of mind to know this project would get messy – only in my daydream the mess happened somewhere in the last stage of the project, the stage that involves tempera paints). 

 

4 year olds are great little helpers – but their attention spans are 4 minutes long.  If you have a project that takes less than 5 minutes you won’t find a more diligent little worker than a 4 year old.  But it definitely takes longer than 4 minutes to paper mache a piñata in the shape of a number 4. 

 

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to blow up the balloons and tie them together the evening before our big project day.  Which was no small feat itself.  I learned that even tied-together balloons aren’t going to hold their shape all by themselves and politely wait for newspaper strips soaked in flour and water to glue them in place.  But hey, holding balloons into the shape of a number 4 sounds like a great job for a 4 year old.

 

But here’s what else I didn’t take into account on this little project;  there is nothing more fabulous when you’re 4 years old than burying your hands up to your elbows in flour.  Who knew that flour is the most amazing substance on earth?  That’s it’s powdery and soft and silky, and spits fun little “poofs” into the air that slowly waft down to cover the kitchen floor.  And the dog.  And the new kitchen table, and even the mommy. 

 

Here’s a bit of advice about making glue.  Put a little flower in the bucket first and then slowly add water.  Because doing it the other way – adding flour to half a bucket full of water – is perhaps not fastest or most economical method.  A half a bucket of water takes a whole heck of a lot of flour before it reaches the consistency of glue. 

 

And of course, if you do it backwards the 4 year old gets to play with flour for the entire length of their attention span.  Which actually doubles when it involves things like flour and water and results in an astronomical mess.

 

I don’t think I even have space here to begin to get into howimpossible it is to pull the glue-soaked paper out of the bucket, squeegee the excess glue off between two fingers, and place the paper over the balloons in such a way that the whole mass will eventually resemble the number 4. 

 

But trust me on this one – it’s not a job for one person.  And amazingly enough, once the vat of glue mixture is thick enough to use, and the newspaper is torn into strips, and the flour has been put back into the cupboard – the 4 year old is done with this project and wanders away to watch a movie.  And there’s mom, up to her elbows in glue, back aching because there’s no way I’m doing any paper mache on my new kitchen table, muttering, “Stop moving, you stupid balloon, you are the crossbar of the number 4… get ON there newspaper, no, not like that, flat, oh for goodness sake, 4, number 4, who’s bright idea was this paper mache thing, anyway?

 

Sometimes an idea should get the green.  Sometimes somebody should just stop me before I even get started.