Allie's 'Gettin Ink Done'

Allie and the Red Pen

Allie's in the doghouse. She got a little carried away with a red felt tip pen. This is not the first time. This time it was her clothes instead of her finger and toe nails. The time before that it was her feet. Waaaay back in 2007-ish, it was a permanent GREEN marker all over her body (see photo). I do understand her need to decorate herself. My only concern is that if we're not careful, we're going to find ourselves with a fifteen year old addicted to tattoos. We've already had to tame the lipgloss beast that emerges each morning before preschool, at least that's washable. Ink and tattoos...well...not so much.

In any case, she walked into the room with her pajama pants rolled up like shorts. I thought it looked a little weird but with Allie, it might just be a fashion statement, so I didn't comment on it. An hour later, when the pants were STILL rolled up, I got curious. It couldn't have been very comfortable to have those giant rolls around her thighs. Kevin finally asked her what the deal was. She explained that she'd 'accidently' gotten 'a little' red ink on her pajama pants. This admission sent us into an immediate red-ink-pen panic. Where had she found it? What else had she used it on? Did she put the cap back on when she was done? Where had she left it? She needed to unroll those pants legs, NOW.

She was hesitant to comply with the unrolling. She just said it really was an 'accident'. Kevin told her to get busy unrolling. One entire leg of her pink bottoms was covered in red stripes and doodles and dots and zig-zags. The only way it had been an accident would have been if she'd done it while sleepwalking, nobody could accidently do that much damage. Then, I got a brief flash of our future. In it, she would be wearing a sleeveless blouse to show off her tattood arms and she'd be holding a can of spray paint that she'd used to decorate the brick wall behind her. I'm deeply afraid my daughter is a graffitti artist in training.

I hope we don't have to use her college fund for bail money or anything like that if she gets caught. I'm going to hide all the paint and all the ink in our house so as not to encourage her. In the meantime, its back to the old timeout to think about why she wrote on her clothing .