The seemingly unforseeable

We trundled off to playgroup today- just for something different. When we arrived Alex and Olivia went straight for the water table as they do everytime. The water table is a tub of water on legs with a scraping of the wet stuff at the bottom; just enough to gather a little into a small jug if dragged along the tub floor. The water is then poured into a container with a hole in the bottom, which makes a wheel spin around.....but this blog isn't really about the water table, it is about paint.
We were at the water table when one of the co-ordinators wandered over to inform us of a 'foot painting' opportunity over in the far corner of the playgroup hall. "Okay....thanks," I hesitantly replied.
A little later, a second co-ordinator came over. She too inform us of the foot painting. I glanced over at the foot painting area; it was as I had feared it to be - a long piece of butchers paper, surounded by some trays of paint (if you can call three pieces of alfoil with paint slopped in the middle, 'paint trays'). At the end of the butchers paper was a bowl of water of questionable stability, presumeably placed there to wash one's feet afterward.
"Do you want to do a foot painting?", I asked Alex in a bored tone, so as not to excite his imagination too much. "No!", came the reply, much to my relief. I looked at the co-ordinator and shrugged, "he doesn't want to do it. Sorry". She wasn't heartbroken, believe me!
Later into the session, I was was playing cars with Alex and Olivia. Many of the other women chatted together, content that their children had settled enough to go play with whatever took their fancy, but this satisfying mid-session calm was about to be brought to an abrupt hault!
A woman who brought her neighbour's child to the group, gasped upon noticing that the fourteen month old was covered in bright orange and blue paint - all eyes were momentarily on the woman and child as she blurted "what have you done"!. Bracing ourselves for what we might see next, the room slowly turned and we lifted our eyes toward the foot painting area (hee hee!).
The evidence demonstrated that the little girl had indeed trapsed through the paints contributing her own set of prints to the masterpiece. But she did not stop there, no siree! She had sat in the paint and had stomped around the perimentre of the butchers paper, all over the wooden floor. She had also toppled the precarious looking bowl of water; the greyish river fully soaking one end of the painting, and spilling under the locked cupboard door running alongside it. To top it off, she then managed to make she squelchy way around the room with her paint sodden feet, to where she now stood, in front of a throng of mouth gapping caregivers. The foot painting was a write off. It was seen scrunched and discarded in the corner of the room after the rest of us grabbed towels to mop up the water or scrub paint off the floor, while the horrified caregiver scrubbed the little girl - who no doubt, had a lovely time!!!!
It was a priceless moment really, but why no one could have forseen such an incident occuring between a room full of 0-5 year olds and a largely unsupervised paint project, is beyond me.