Parenthood is basically a series of decision making tests. If you skills prove effective, you may just find yourself the parent of a child with a full scholarship, or perhaps even offspring so successful they buy you a summer house in gratitude.

While these decisions may possibly add up to the future success of your brood, for the most part they come at you as small, seemingly inconsequential matters. Skim? Whole? 1%? 2%? Soy? Organic? Private… Charter… Public… Magnet… Boarding? Elmo or Barney? Baby Gap or Children’s Place? The playground or the museum? It never ends.

Then there are the toys. Will they learn from this? Lose the pieces in less than a week? Will it promote their creativity? It was this question that was crossing my mind last Sunday morning. We had told At-man that if the Cane’s won the Stanley Cup we would buy some fire works to set off. Even though he had only been there a handful of times, he immediately asked to go to Wal-Mart. What the heck we thought; Wal-Mart seemed for some reason to be the perfect place to get decent cheap fireworks. As we strolled through the endless sea of crap, on the end cap of one particular isle At-man spotted “sidewalk paint”. He had excitedly shown me this particular item several times at Target, but at Target it was 10 dollars, which seemed a bit pricey for something made to wash away at the end of the day. Wal-Mart, amazingly enough, had the same item for a measly 3 dollars. It was at this time that a decision was made. A decision so lacking in reason that photographic evidence will be presented in order to give you a visual aid to help you realize just how little actual thought went into this particular decision.

As you can see, sidewalk paint is a euphemism for florescent child coating. It was everywhere. It started innocently enough. One minute the boys were happily painting on the driveway, the next Em was rolling his own tummy. After losing inspiration he became rejuvenated when the idea struck him to start painting his brother. As luck would have it, the “sidewalk paint seems harmless” decision coincided directly with the “let them use it right before we are supposed to start dinner” decision. I must admit, they did seem to be having a great time, and I laughed so much I was a bit sore the next day. It was one of those unwise decisions that turned out being good after all.

Now I’m pretty sure an evening spent with eyelashes full of blue paint won’t rate me any less of a beach house, but I do promise to consider the clean up factor a little more carefully in the future. No wonder the stuff was marked down to 3 dollars.