Why are children?

On the last day of co-op last year, Alexander's class was released early and they came outside with what was a rather messy art project at the time. You can see it on the whiteboard just behind Rachel's head in this picture. 

It's a Santa that he painted on a piece of paper that he made in his class...that he then glued to a piece of black construction paper with liberal amounts of glue. It's fine now...but at the time it was exceedingly messy.

He came to me with this drippy mess in the middle of my ukulele lesson and just...handed it to me. And I was like, "What am I going to do with this?!" not because it wasn't lovely but because it was so soggy. 

I tried to put it down in a safe place—out of foot traffic, away from toddlers, and where it wasn't liable to blow away in the wind—but soon Phoebe came up to me with her hands covered in paint.

"Excuse me while we take a quick break to wipe our hands off in the grass," I said to my class. "Phoebe is covered in paint."

"Paint?!" one of my helper-moms echoed sympathetically (she apparently hadn't seen the artwork hand-off). "We are outside! How did she even find paint?! Ugh. Why are toddlers? I'm so glad I'm out of that stage..."

I mean, I certainly feel that sentiment. Not so much the "being out of that stage" part, but the wondering about why toddlers are the way they are.

But lately I've been wondering if children are any better. 

For example, the other night we sent the kids upstairs to brush their teeth and the next thing we know, Alexander is sheepishly approaching us holding the false front of one of our bathroom cabinets. 

We have six drawers and two false fronts in our bathroom. True, the false fronts have drawer pulls on them, which makes it seem like they should be real drawers. But...if you will just imagine the amount of force required—by a somewhat scrawny seven-year-old child—to yank the false front from the cabinet...

He was not exerting an insignificant amount of force. He was wresting that thing with as much energy as he could muster. 

Fortunately it just clips back into place, so no harm was done...but, again, that was an activity took considerable force from an adult to put back in place (that adult was Andrew because I tried and couldn't do it, concluding that I'd need to fetch a rubber mallet or something to whack it back into place, and then he just hammered it in using his bare hands). 

But then—guys—there is this little number:

I was making some potato filling for pirogies on NYE and pulled the cheese out of the fridge to discover someone had taken a chunk of it like...this. Why?

Here I wish I could link to that one time one of the children cut themselves a piece of banana bread—a big square like this—right from the middle of the loaf. But I can't find it right now.

Instead I will tell you that the child who I think cut themselves such an abominable piece of banana bread (I think it was Rachel) has grown up just fine. So fine that she made a carrot cake for me yesterday just because I wanted one...because there was one at the last linger longer, but I couldn't have any because I forgot all of my dental care stuff (so couldn't take out my trays...so couldn't eat). 

And the carrot cake she made was very delicious.

So rest assured that while they're covered in paint and yanking off cupboard doors and doing...whatever this is...to the cheese now, they're turning into some pretty spectacular humans.