“Have kids,” they said. “It will be fun,” they said.

The day the eldest decided that he was going to school dressed as Banksy for Word Book Day, was one of those moments when you know you have dragged the kids up correctly and there was a little spring in my step during the school run that morning. Not only was he thinking outside the box, he was being super cool with it.

The eldest’s coolness had clearly rubbed off on the younger members of the family too, and following a quick visit to our local hardware store and hobby shop we where all busy printing off and cutting stencils. Several hours later and thankfully we all bore no serious scars from the craft knife cutting, we were ready to get creative. 

Plonking ourselves in the front garden we armed everyone with spray paint and the stencils and fired away at some mounted canvas frames. We had had an eclectic mix of Call of Duty, GTA and Disney themed pieces but each respective artist was pleased and for me it completed another day where I had refereed enough to stop one of
them killing another. So a win/win!

Not quite.

As I turned my back to start clearing I hadn’t noticed the middle boy talking to one of our neighbours kids and I clearly hadn’t noticed her spray around her feet with some bright pink spray paint, in her brand new trainers. I also didn’t notice the pair of them spray their hair with the same pink paint. I appreciate that this is a lot to miss and I’m sure you will agree, they managed a lot in such a short amount of time and for that I suppose I should be proud. Their time management was amazing.

Top tip for removing spray paint from your kids hair

The remainder of the day was spent googling how to get
Car Spray out of children’s hair. Yes, there is a section of the internet
dedicated to this very issue. Feeling thankful that I wasn’t the first to encounter this problem I decided we would put it down to experience and fingers crossed he wouldn’t be daft enough to do it again.

Dad’s Delicious Dinners Top Spray Painting Tip

The secret? Oh, its cooking oil. Rub it all over the hair and the paint comes off! He smelt like a fish and chip shop for a week, but he didn’t have pink hair. But this made me wonder, who, how and why did someone discover this. Actually scrap the why bit, they and I knew why, together with a small section of other parents who had googled the same issue. But why? Who thinks, cooking oil will remove stubborn paint stains from a child’s head.