Graffiti Blues

Isn’t it amazing how quickly kids can get up to mischief? Turn around for a moment and they are into something they shouldn’t be. On Tuesday night we went to the Hollandse School for a parent/teacher evening for Niels. This meant the boys were with a babysitter for the first time – Nancy, the Philippino woman who also cleans for us on Mondays.
All went well and they had a great time coloring in pictures, reading books, playing with Lego and who knows what else. And because it was Nancy and not their awful mother looking after them, they even went to bed and stayed there, something previously unknown in our experience. However at some stage Carl must have smuggled the felt-tip pens into his room. The next morning at breakfast I was sitting groggily at the table still 80% asleep when Holger came in (perky and chipper and wide awake of course) carrying Carl. I thought I was hallucinating – Carl looked like one of the tattooed gang members from the movie Once Were Warriors! His legs were completely covered in dark blue pen, his arms were coloured green from above the elbow down to his hands and there was a green goatee around his cheeky little smile. The “oh my god” hadn’t even left my lips before Holger asked accusingly “did you know he had pens in his room?!”
Yes honey, that would be me, the mother who gives her two year old pens to play with unsupervised in an apartment that is painted completely white.
Back in Lochem something similar once happened. I was colouring in pictures with the boys and stopped to get them drinks. I could hear them giggling and when I came back Niels had coloured both of their noses black! And I mean BLACK. All over black. They looked like two big puppies sitting there giggling, Carl going cross-eyed trying to look at his blackened snout.
Either that or frost bite victims.
Of course it is really difficult to get that ink off lily white skin like Carl’s. We put him in the shower and scrubbed him till he was pink all over but it still wouldn’t come off. Only the green goatee disappeared, he must have put that on last. Later in the day I went to the supermarket, strapping Carl into his buggy so he didn’t have to walk because it was so warm. The whole time people walking towards us would look at Carl, look at me, then look down at Carl again with an expression of “okaaaaay, definitely an amateur parent. Poor kid”. I felt like I was the one with pen on my face, the words BAD MOTHER scrawled across my forehead. When I got home I discovered that he had also covered the soles of his feet green and red. Because we hadn’t scrubbed those they were still as bright as when he’d coloured them and as he sat in his buggy with his bare feet poking straight out that’s the first thing people had seen.
Almost all of the white kids we see in Singapore are accompanied by a Philipino nanny, we really are an exception in not having one. I could just imagine what people were thinking when they saw my multi-coloured little graffiti-hound waving his feet around. The looks in their eyes said “just employ some professional help lady”.
Score: Carl 1, Mummy 0