in which there is grey paint

At the beginning of each school break, Cherry's teacher sends home with each of the students a large notebook, filled with the work that they have been doing at school. At the end of the break, we return it so that she can continue to fill it with more things over the next weeks. Normally, everything is glued into the notebook, but occasionally there is something that doesn't fit that way, and I typically end up removing that and hanging it up in our apartment when we send the book back.

Last time, I ended up taking out a painting of swirling snow, done in grey and white, with a photo of Cherry wearing a hat and scarf (ironically, they aren't permitted to wear scarves at school for fear of strangulation) in the middle. For a while, the painting lived on our refrigerator, and then at some point it disappeared, and, evidently, ended up in the kids' bedroom.

I discovered this on Sunday morning, when Sapphire burst into the living room to tell me that Cherry was sprinkling water from her sippy cup onto the painting. This didn't strike me as too much of a problem, since I was pretty sure that she was just experimenting based on a Big Backyard story we'd read a few days earlier, but I thought that maybe I would go and put the painting somewhere where it could dry out again, since wet paper rips pretty easily.

Of course, the paint that they use at maternelle is water based, and so when Cherry sprinkled water on it, it had gotten wet again. Apparently, while Sapphire was getting me, Ramona, I mean Cherry, had placed the painting on the (carpeted, in beige) floor of the bedroom and then proceeded to walk through the painting and across the floor, repeatedly. Of course, that meant that she left small grey footprints all over the carpet. What to do? First, I had Ezio move the painting to the table in the kitchen. Then, Sapphire was directed to get a washcloth and clean the bottoms of Cherry's feet before she could do any more damage.

Fortunately, there was a bottle of carpet cleaner for big carpet cleaning machines in the closet, so I diluted that and poured it into a pitcher. Sapphire and Ezio collected all the dry towels in the house, and I began to carefully pour some cleaning solution on each footprint, gently agitate with my fingers, and blot with the towels to soak up as much of the paint (and cleaning solution) as possible. Twenty minutes later, we had a (mostly) paint free floor, a contrite Cherry, and a full load of wet towels which we tossed into the washing machine.