Diabolical Art Project

I got this one from my own mother, unfortunately. When my siblings and I were little and made the catastrophic mistake of telling Mom we were “bored” during summer vacation, she had a solution. No craft kits. No trip to the zoo. No $47 worth of shit from Target that would entertain us for twelve minutes. She handed each of us a cup of water and an old toothbrush and sent us outside. We had a dark concrete driveway, and when it got wet, it turned even darker. Congratulations, children. You’re artists now. Go away.

And honestly? It worked. You dip the toothbrush in the water and use it to paint pictures on the driveway—houses, animals, your name, whatever masterpiece your little unemployed freeloader can dream up. Give them different-sized paintbrushes if you want to class the place up, but an old toothbrush has the added benefit of being free and making the whole activity feel vaguely Dickensian. All you need is a cup of water, something to paint with, a warm sunny day, and concrete that noticeably changes color when it gets wet.

The fun part—or the cruel part, depending on your perspective—is that the sun immediately begins destroying their artwork. They start off happily painting a giant dinosaur, but before they can finish the tail, the dinosaur’s damn head is disappearing. Now they’re frantically racing around trying to repaint the head while finishing the legs, except the body is fading, and suddenly what started as a peaceful little art project has become a high-stakes battle between your child and evaporation. Finish the picture before the sun eats it. There’s your challenge. You can even make it a game: biggest picture, longest-lasting picture, most ridiculous picture, or see if they can complete an entire scene before the first part disappears.

Eventually, of course, the sun wins. It always wins. Your child’s masterpiece vanishes completely, leaving absolutely nothing behind except a wet toothbrush and maybe twenty glorious minutes during which nobody asked you what they could do because they were bored. When I was a kid, we didn’t even have cell phones to photograph our creations before they disappeared into the atmosphere. Your kids do, so snap a picture before it evaporates—or don’t. There’s something beautifully appropriate about spending half an hour creating something that completely disappears. It’s art. It’s science. It costs basically nothing. And most importantly, the kids are outside.