Creativity and the Almost 5 Year Old

I am really working on keeping this updated, but the last couple of weeks have been pretty trying on this Mom!

If you know anything about the books I am reading, you might notice that two of them are by Lisa Whelchel. You might know the name, she played Blair on "The Facts of Life" and is now a Christian speaker and author. Lisa has a way of making motherhood funny. She doesn't pretend that it's all easy or fun and games, but she helps me to laugh a the trials that I go through as a mom. I sometimes find laughing at life hard, I guess that's the perfectionist in me. I really enjoy reading her books. I have traveled to Waco, Texas, to see her speak at a weekend conference, and I am planning to lead a bible study this summer for the mom's at church on her book "Creative Correction." Which in the end makes this post even more funny!

So on to the trials of the last few weeks. It all started when a dear friend called to let me know that she could meet one evening for a mom's night out. We weren't on the phone for more than 5 minutes when Princess TD came running in and said, "Mommy, look what Little TD did to my hair!" Insert picture here!!

Yes, my dear Princess TD had taken the sissors that I use to trim her hair and chopped off her hair! See, the humor here is that a girl from church, who has since moved to another city (about a year ago), had her hair cut short about the time she turned 5, so in my little engineer's mind, she's about to be 5, so she must have short hair too! Well, knowing this, Mr. TD and I have come up with a little bit of "creative correction" of our own. We are not cutting her hair just yet. See, since she wants it short, she will have won in her mind, and it's not nearly as embarrassing as having to tell people who notice and ask, that she cut her own hair. Now before you go thinking that we are horrible for letting her go without a haircut, when you actually brush and style her hair, it's not that obvious, but you can tell that something's just not quite right.

Now, you may also notice that her face appears to be a little brown in the pictures. Well, she doesn't have a tan! She also got into my make-up and decided to play with my powder foundation and crush my eyeshadows and blushes with her finger. No particular reason, just because it sounded like fun!

That was last week.

This week, I was sure, was going to be much better. It couldn't get much worse right? Wrong! Yesterday morning, she decided that when I asked her to brush her teeth, she didn't want to do what I asked. Ok, that's well and good (maybe). But instead of just not doing it, she decided to play in the water and get Little TD in on the action. Together, in the span of 3 minutes (I checked the clock folks), she managed to get him to pour enough water on the bathroom runner that it was completely soaked as well as most of the carpet outside the bathroom door. And when I walked in, she was squeezing what remained of her toothpaste into the cup of water before telling Little TD to pour it on the floor!

No stunning pictures of that. But I did call Mr. TD at work to see if I needed to do anything special to the shop vac before I used it on the water. All he did was laugh! Ok, it really is funny! These are just childhood things and in the overall scheme of things, really no big deal. However, the behavior is typically not encouraged in our home or society, so we need to establish the time and place to play "dress-up" and for experimentation with liquids!

Now that you all have finished laughing too, how would you handle this? How would you go about teaching about the time and place for doing things? We are fresh out of ideas. Anyone else with a logical, creative child (almost sounds like an oxymoron)?