Mother-Daughter Painting Date

In a way, Mother's Day has gotten nicer as my girls have gotten older and become involved in school and extracurricular activities. Why? Because now I get more cute Mother's Day-related crafts, presents, and service, thanks to my daughters' teachers and activity leaders. Thanks, everyone, for hyping up Mother's Day and encouraging my kids to honor it! It is nice to feel needed.

In a future post, I'll show what all my Mother's Day goodies were this year. However, there was one activity a few days before the holiday that I really enjoyed. Celeste's Girl Scout troop held a mommy-daughter painting party, and we were both excited to participate!

This was one of the many Girl Scout activities of the spring, that have been paid for with "cookie money." It's been nice to see her having so much fun with some of these activities, and it was nice to join her for one of them! All the supplies were provided, we just had to show up and be ready to paint.

Neither Celeste nor I had ever participated in a painting party before. And I'll be honest; artistic ability is not something our family is blessed with. However, all we were required to do for this particular project was watch Ms. Carolina (Celeste's troop leader) paint the picture, and then do our best to follow her lead.

Even then, my copy of the painting wasn't too great!! I confess, I spent a lot of time peering at the other mom's pictures, being amazed at how easy they made it look, while I sweated over every brushstroke. The end result looked stunted and un-dramatic to me, but hey...I did the best I could!

One thing I did love about this project, though, was that Celeste was painting the "mirror" of my picture, so our pictures would match together! I was very excited to put them on the wall.

Like me, Celeste often seemed frustrated or ill at ease with her work; more than once, she complained about the picture "not looking good." However, I helped her with some of the more difficult parts, and she did have fun painting little flowers all over her canvas. In the end, she was pleased with her work, especially once she saw how her picture matched up with mine!

This was a really great activity for me and my sweet daughter. I was so happy to get this opportunity to work with Celeste, and I am happy we will always have a visual reminder of our time together. Even if our paintings weren't the prettiest ones to come out of that activity, they mean a great deal to me because they represent me spending some quality time together with my sweet middle child, who sometimes gets a little overlooked in the crazy race that is our lives.

Now, these two pictures are hanging on the wall of Celeste's bedroom, side by side. I love to go in there and look at them hanging together; it reminds me how lucky I am to have such a loving, enthusiastic, creative, sweet daughter.