When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. Who doesn’t, I guess. I mixed this and that, sometimes with permission, sometimes surreptitiously. At one point, I even determined that I could certainly make my own alcohol, so set some potato peelings to ferment, and not knowing really about the distillation process, created what could only be called later a foul mess.

Today, L was less ambitious. She wanted, appropriately enough for her interests and gifts, to create paint. She mixed various food colorings together, taking careful notes about proportions.

In the end, they all wound up in the sink, I believe. She couldn’t figure out a way to thicken the mixture into a paint that didn’t involve some idea like mixing yogurt into it. We’re more than happy to let her play, let her experiment, let her explore, but everything has a certain limit.