Ahem.
On that particular night, I had a coupon, and thus I did a lot of damage at Lakeshore Learning. I bought a couple of fun little stocking stuffers for the girls, but I tried to keep my cart stocked only with homeschool supplies that I thought would be truly useful for us in the coming year--math stuff, reading and writing stuff, no science stuff because the science stuff that I'd had my eye on was REALLY expensive, supplies and materials, etc.
I admit that I splurged a little on the no-spill paint cups, since they weren't exactly on my must-have list, but I have always wanted a set for the girls, and these were a better price than others I'd seen, AND the store was also selling a set of paintbrushes that exactly matched the cups. Soooooo organized!
A recent rainy day was the perfect time to set up our new paint supplies. I have a set of basic colors of tempera paint in gallon containers (one of the reasons that I'd wanted these no-spill paint cups was to save me the hassle of getting out six gallon jugs of paint and pouring them into small containers every time the girls want to paint, especially considering that the dispensers that came with the gallon jugs and are supposed to make paint dispensing a breeze do NOT make dispensing a breeze, and actually make dispensing impossible unless you take off the dispenser), but the no-spill cups allow for more colors, the secondary colors plus brown, so we also got to do a practical color-mixing project in order to get everything all set up nicely:
We've owned the Dick Blick student-grade tempera paint for about a year and a half now, and we're about halfway through each of our gallon jugs. Whenever I need to restock, I am definitely buying a higher-quality tempera, because one of the many little niggling things that bother me about this particular tempera is how unusual its color-mixing is. When the girls mixed together blue and red and stirred it up, they got brown instead of purple. Fortunately, when Willow mixed red and green and a little black in order to make brown--
she ended up with purple! Yay, because then I just switched the lids on the two containers so now we have the correct colors, but boo, not the best color-mixing homeschool lesson.
After a lot of mixing and a lot of mess--
--and yes, that's MY messy hand, not even a child's, of course we had to get down on the floor and try out our brand-new art supplies. I threw down loads of newspaper (which didn't do a thing; we still had to scrub the floor afterwards, which was perfectly fine with me, as then we had a clean floor) and got out our super-big Strathmore newsprint pads, and off the girls went to create and create and create. 
Part of the reason for the rainbow's demise, I believe, was an effort to mimic Willow's painting. She painted her entire canvas black, let it dry, then added her space scene:
Painting kept the girls educated and entertained during that last hour or so before Matt got home, when I'm typically trying to cook dinner while fending off fights and kitchen invasions. Then we all cleaned up the paint, scrubbed the floor spic-and-span, cleaned the table, ate, cleared the table, and finally scrubbed the girls spic-and-span--paint in the hair, sure, but behind the ears?!?
After drying the girls off and combing their hair, Matt got distracted and neglected to finish putting the girls to bed right away. A little while later he grabbed the toothbrushes and went looking for kiddos. Willow was found pretty easily, but Sydney? Hmmm, where did that little Sydney get to?
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