Dinner Time Messiness

So today is my first post for the Week of Messiness!  I'm probably a little too excited for my kids to be making messes in the house, but I'll be honest in that it really hasn't been that hard.  Yes, I do have to remind myself that the table and floors won't rot in 5 minutes and I've been keeping my knitting close by for stress relief.

My plans had been to do crafts but I realized that meal times are plenty messy and offer a great 'real life' experience for my kids to learn from.  So last night I grabbed my phone and snapped a few pics to show you a brief (truly brief) look into my household.

What kid doesn't like whip cream, chocolate whip cream at that?!  So I placed a large spoonful of the tasty treat on Thaddeus' tray and let him have fun.  He ate most of it rather quickly, but as it melted he began to finger paint with it which was my ultimate goal :)

Vinny couldn't be outdone either so he decided he needed to wear his BBQ sauce...

Now, I could have gone all Neat Freak Mom and lost it, grabbing paper towels, disinfectant and mumbling about how I'm always cleaning up after the kids.  But I didn't.  I let them play, have fun and laugh and look at Vinny's smile...totally worth it!  Nevertheless I didn't clean them up, much.

Vinny thought the best way to clean himself up was to play with the water in his cup.  Normally I would have been upset and I'm not planning on this becoming the norm but I did like his creativity in his clean up solution.

He'd been writing with markers earlier that day.

Now Thaddeus is 15 months old so I gave him a wet wash cloth and he went to town!  Seriously, he washed his tray completely and he got his face and hands...the fingers needed a little help (which he wasn't too thrilled about) but look at the results...

He was so proud and would scream every time I tried to take over the cleaning...so I stopped trying.

One day down, four more to go!

{{hugs}}
Buffy


Are you intentionally letting your kids make a mess so you can teach them how to clean it up?  Are your kids grown and now you wish you did this?  Let's share thoughts on how we teach our children to clean up after themselves.