My apologies to the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you give a kid an African Violet, she’s going to need to repot it.

So you buy a cheap clay flowerpot and tell her she can paint it. You get out the acrylic paints and brushes and she paints the flowerpot. The flowerpot is left to dry and the paints don’t get put away.

That night you stay up too late and since your son is gone visiting Grandma this week, you sleep til noon the next day.

When you get up you find that the kid has emptied eighteen tubes of acrylic paint onto a serving platter since her pallet wasn’t big enough for all of them.

She has painted a wedding gift for her aunt on which she used exactly four of the eighteen colors.

She has also painted a picture on 20# bond printer paper that she wants to enter in the fair. It’s a good picture but she can’t enter it because it isn’t on a canvas. It’s on printer paper. You try to remember where you put the canvases you bought last summer for the fair but realize you have to buy more paint now and groan because those little tubes of acrylics are so expensive. So are the canvases but you bought a dozen of them last year expecting lots of do-overs and she only ended up using two of them.

She has ruined a total of four kitchen towels and her clothes. If there is anything that takes acrylic paint out of cloth you don’t know what it is.

But you don’t complain about any of it. You don’t want to squelch her creativity. And anyway, it’s your fault for sleeping late when you should have been supervising.

So, if you give a kid an African Violet, you’re going to need new paint, new towels, and new clothes. And you’re going to realize that it is time to start stressing about fair entries for this year.

And the violet still hasn’t been repotted.