Little Lauryn

Words cannot even begin to describe this little lady of mine. She is definitely a unique one. Lauryn is a nurturer. She loves to take care of Clara. She makes sure she has everything she needs; drinks, blankets, snacks. Lauryn is very sensitive. She worries if anyone is unhappy and tries to make everyone feel better. Then there is this other side of Lauryn that is somewhat devilish. She is very creative. She loves to paint and color. The problem is her favorite place to paint and color is on herself on Clara on the walls and everywhere you can imagine she should not be writing. It is a daily occurrence for me to have to clean the walls of her latest artwork. I try to put pens and crayons, etc. out of reach but she ALWAYS finds them. Well, on Monday we had our first Sharpie encounter. I was on the phone with my husband for a few minutes. I thought to myself, "hmmm Lauryn has been quiet while I was on the phone." Usually this means she has emptied the medicine cabinet but this time when I found her It was like nothing I have ever seen before. She had colored on every wall in her room on all of the furniture, on her comforter, on both of the cloth chairs in her room, ALL OVER her body. Thankfully she just drew little scribbles all over the place instead of big scribbles. I almost started crying when I saw what she had done in the matter of 15 minutes. I handed her a wet rag and made her start scrubbing. After about 30 minutes of scrubbing with every cleaner I could think of and every solution google suggested I realized I needed something more so my sweet little neighbor, Ethan came over and sat with my kids (Lauryn was not to leave her room) and I went to the store where I proceeded to spend 40 dollars on cleaning supplies. When I got home Lauryn had fallen asleep on her bed. I know what you are thinking 'Oh poor little thing'. Well, I didn't feel sorry for her. In fact, I woke her up and made her keep scrubbing. I think she ended up scrubbing for about 1 1/2 hours. Go ahead and call social services. I was determined to get a message through. So...I scrubbed and scrubbed and made very little progress. Finally Dave came home to the rescue. He was able to scrub the ink out of the chair and it left the fabric just a little lighter. So we were left with a few places on the wall that I will need to paint over, a ruined throw pillow, ruined pillow sham and a blue streak of marker on Lauryn's quilt that I have a blanket draped over. So the bad news is my hands are shredded from all the cleaners I exposed them to but the good news is that Lauryn will live for another day.