Noah loves to color. I mean loves it. If he sees a crayon, he reaches for it. If he sees his box of crayons, he brings it to me and gives me the sweetest puppy dog eyes I’ve ever seen. He also has these Pooh character shaped crayons from a friend overseas that he will find and then beg me to color with them.

He does far better than I expected him to, as well. I kind of expected him to eat the crayon (not out of the picture, either, because I fully expect him to get curious if orange actually tastes like orange) or hold it awkwardly and therefore not be able to actually draw. Instead, he’ll adjust it in his hands (or ask me to do it), then he’ll make marks on the paper that get better each time he tries. I’m pretty impressed, to be honest, because I don’t have much hand-to-eye coordination. In fact, I’m a bit of a klutz, and have been since I was a child.

Anyway, the slight problem with the fact that he likes to color is that anything white is his canvas. We live in an apartment, where we can’t paint our walls. You see where I’m going with this, right?

Yeah. He totally colored on our bedroom door when I wasn’t looking. It has a gorgeous red scribble about 6 inches below the doorknob and he seems really proud of it. I took the crayon away like a good mother (albeit a bit delayed) and so he grabbed his baby carrot, which looks suspiciously like an orange crayon, and tried to color with that! And yet, how could I be angry? My son saw something that looked like a really big piece of paper and he thought he should fill it up. I’m actually kind of proud.

As for the lease and apartment rules…well, they’ll have to paint anyway, so I’m not all that worried about it. We’ll probably be here for a few more years and it wouldn’t surprise me if a couple more slip ups happened but at least I learned my lesson – supervise those crayons! I have a little artist on my hands. ;-)