Tree Tan leads to Reading Wonder

Yesterday when I went to preschool to pick up Tatum, I arrived a bit late and snack was finished.  The class was working on painting the truck of a tree by having a long piece of paper laid out on the table and each kid positioned to finger paint their part of the trunk.  “Look Momma, I’m painting!” Tatum exclaimed as Hazel and I entered the room.  Hazel was fast asleep in the carseat, so I sat down at the end of the table near Tatum and observed. 

“Are you done Tatum” her teacher Ms. Angela asked.  “No, I am not done yet” she replied.  

 Tatum continued to paint until she found a way to paint the paper not only with her hands but using her forearms.  This lead to Tatum painting her entire arms with the brown paint until finally she declared “I’m done.”  

The brown paint left a faint purple stain to the skin so I new we would need to take bath.  When we came home Tatum put on a sleeveless dress which showed off her new preschool version of sunless suntan lotion, with her shoulders and upper arms bare of the tan.  Tatum did not want to take a bath, and being now the mother of a newborn again, I didn’t push it (Really, I’m not pushing too many parenting points these days).  So we agreed she’d take a bath in the morning.

This was the morning to take the bath.

Side bar – Tatum is awesome.  I say this in respect to sleep (She is awesome in other ways too!).  In the mornings, now that she has her own room, she will often wake and sit quietly and read books in her room.  It is not until Andrew and I wake to use the restroom that we hear her.  So who really knows what time she wakes up.  When asked, her default answer is always the same “6:30”.

So this was one of those mornings.  I found her at 7:05am arranging her seven or so DVDs in order on her bedroom floor and checking out her CD collection.  “I want to listen to this CD” she said as I entered the room.  I obliged, and reminded her that this morning she was to take a bath to get off the tree paint from her arms.  I started the CD, which was a read-along from a book she has, and went to draw her bath.  When I came back to the room Tatum was thumbing through the book that goes to the CD.  (I found this to be AWESOME and I sure hope you do too – hence the blog post on the subject). 

We haven’t read the book with the CD since she was about a year old, nor have I put the CD in the player since then, yet we had read the book within the last few months (but definitely not recently).  So that little smarty pants recognized that the CD was a book, went and found the book off of her bookshelf, and began reading it.  

She ended up taking a bath, and the tree tan came off!