Written for the IMBA newsletter, summer 2009 – had to post it here to explain next blog post 😉

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not one of those art and craft type mums. You know the kind I mean. The ones who save their egg cartons for their children to turn into Christmas decorations, whose magazines are barely flicked through before they’re sacrificed for cutting out pictures, and who don’t bat an eyelid if their kitchen floors are covered in glitter, glue and the odd stray feather.

Actually, I think I realised early on that all that palaver just wasn’t for me. When my twins were a year old many of my ‘internet friends’ with children the same age were launching discussions about what types of paint were easiest to wash out of clothes and how to teach their little ones to hold the paintbrush. At that point I was rubbing my bleary eyes and congratulating myself on surviving my first year as a twin mum. Setting my children on the path to becoming future Picassos was pretty much the last thing on my mind. And given that neither of them had an attention span longer than that of a gnat, painting seemed like a pretty pointless project – all that setting up, and cleaning up afterwards, just for five minutes’ entertainment. So I buried my head in the sand and thought ‘time enough for that when they’re two’.

Two came and went, and as they approached the end of their third year they started playschool. Fantastic! A purpose-built space for all kinds of messy activity, where I could drop them off and collect them a few hours later, complete with splodgy pictures and proud smiles on their little faces. At last I could assuage my guilt at not being one of ‘those’ mums – at least they were getting to exercise their creative side in playschool, where those sainted beings known as teachers would clean up the mess and, quite miraculously, not get impatient when they were tired of painting after sixty seconds.

Then my friend threw a spanner in the works by giving the girls ‘Paint your own Raincoat’ kits for Christmas. ‘Drive your Mother Demented While Redecorating your Kitchen’, they may as well have been called. The pestering started almost instantly. When can we paint our raincoats? Can we do it now? Why do we need to buy painting aprons first? When are you going to buy them? Did you buy them yet? Is it time to paint our raincoats? After trying several different shops my husband eventually tracked down two painting aprons (which I suspect cost more than the original kits).

I had run out of excuses to put off the project any longer, and so the fun began. The kits were lovely, but had clearly been designed for children several years older than mine (or perhaps children the same age as mine whose art training had begun a lot earlier – see above). I had to show them how to squeeze out each colour and paint with their fingers, and comply with various requests to draw shapes and letters for them. (The stress of trying to do this with two three-year-olds at once is better imagined than described). An hour later, despite the painting aprons, an old cloth on the kitchen table and newspapers on the floor, the girls had succeeded in getting paint on the table, the chairs, their hair, the floor and a cardigan which neither of them was even wearing at the time – oh, and the raincoats. And as the paint was designed to be permanent, there really wasn’t any point in even trying to remove it. It is safe to say that we won’t be repeating the experiment in a hurry. And any future presents from the above-mentioned friend will be carefully vetted.

Despite my painting phobia, I don’t mind drawing and even sticking, so I decided to embrace my creative side this Father’s Day by encouraging the girls to make their own cards. I gathered together old magazines and catalogues and got them to look through them for the letters we needed to spell out ‘Happy Father’s Day’. I thought this would be a good way to keep them entertained while their dad had a well-earned lie in and I got started on the pancakes he was getting for a special Father’s Day breakfast. And it did entertain them for a while, though the pancakes had to be temporarily abandoned as they needed a lot more help than anticipated. Nevertheless, we soldiered on, cutting and arranging and sticking, and finally assembled two cards which ended up looking more like ransom notes than anything else.

Baking is another thing mothers are supposed to enjoy doing with their children. And yet again it was something my internet friends seemed to be doing from somewhere around the first birthday. I just didn’t get it. Baking was something I enjoyed doing on my own while the girls had a nap. Why on earth would I want to turn something nice and relaxing into something crazy involving two toddlers spilling a bag of flour over themselves and the floor, then getting bored and whining at me to do something else just when I reach a crucial point in the recipe?

Now that they’re three and can actually get involved properly, we’ve reached a compromise. I do all the boring bits like measuring and mixing and rubbing in the butter, and they do the fun bits like cutting out the biscuit shapes. Perfect solution. However since I have to make use of a DVD to occupy them before and after their starring role, I’m not sure it really passes the ‘quality time’ test.

All in all, I think I’m a bit of a failure at this side of motherhood. But I can read dozens of books in a row without getting bored, can help with jigsaws till the cows come home, and can and do take them on all sorts of fun outings. So maybe I should just stick to what I’m good at, and leave the other stuff to the experts. Thank God for playschool.