Face Painting!

As we've grown as parents, Anna and I have learned some important lessons.  One of the most important has been to figure out which restaurants give you deals on kids meals.  Once you have more than one kid, you have to learn where to get free food.  We don't always take advantage of the deals, but it's good to know where to go to get free/discounted/cheap food on any given night.  This developed skill is what brought us to Moe's last night.

On Tuesday nights, Moe's (at least in Montgomery) has free kids meals with the purchase of an adult entree.  They also bring in some sort of child-friendly activity.  Sometimes it's a balloon animal guy (who my friend Chad and I call "The Lonely Balloon Man" because of his insistence on making really depressing, banal small talk), but last night it was a pair of super-nice face painters.  Addie really likes the face painters whenever they're at Moe's; she's just always refused to actually get her face painted.  She'll allow them to paint her hands, but she has been staunchly anti-face.

Well, last night we were sitting at dinner, and Addie saw another little girl who had gotten an octopus painted on her face.  Addie turned toward Anna and said, "I want an octopus on my face!"  Anna and I looked at each other incredulously.  After a couple of minutes feeling Addie out to make sure she wouldn't freak out the second a brush touched her face, Addie was sitting in the chair getting a blue octopus on her face.  She was so excited and so good!  She sat still and was very sweet to the face painters.

 But it only has five arms!

When we got home, we decided to let Addie keep the paint on her face because she had already had a bath before we left for dinner.  So we put our little painted girl to bed, and things proceeded much as normal.  Now, in order to fully appreciate this story, you need to know that Addie rarely gets out of bed if she wakes up.  Mostly, she'll call out to me or Anna, and she'll sit in the bed until we come to her. 

Well, last night around 11, I'm getting ready for bed, and then down the hall comes walking Addie.  First, she startled me just by her presence.  Second, she freaked me out with her face paint.  Essentially, because of the way that her face was painted, it looked like a miniature version of '80s wrestler The Ultimate Warrior was coming at me.

Although eerily similar, this is not a picture of
Addie throwing a temper tantrum.

I half expected her to run into the room and try to put some sort of scissor slam on me (Full Disclosure: All I know about wrestling is that Koko B. Ware had a parrot, Andre the Giant was in The Princess Bride, and Hulk Hogan fought Rocky in Rocky III).  Fortunately, all Addie did was stagger into our bedroom and tell me she had taken a good nap (much what I would expect a retired, punch-drunk wrestler would do).  I told her it was still night-night time, and I put her back to bed.  The face paint has since been washed off, but the little wrestler in her lives on.  Just watch her body slam one of her sisters.