Nice Colors Thomas

I entered the weekend unenthusiastic about painting. When the weekend was over, the notion of getting my other two fillings this week suddenly seemed exciting. I know little about Thomas the Train, but I would suggest he adopt a new color scheme. The red that lines the base of this mighty engine is much easier to imitate in the imagination of a child than it is on his bedroom walls.

Let me paint a picture of the plan first. Thomas red will coat the top two feet of the wall, Thomas blue the remainder of the wall. There is a two inch median that separates the two colors, to be filled with a piece of décor to be named later – most likely a white stripe or wooden railroad tracks. All of this will reface the sunflower yellow walls that currently wrap around the room.

To help with the yellow, Katie bought primer to make sure we would only need one coat of paint. I didn’t pay much attention when I grabbed the can of primer, other than the simple fact the can said primer and that’s all I needed to know. So I thought. Seems there were two cans of primer, each tinted with a bit of the two paint colors. I grabbed the red tint, which applied to the walls as pink. Katie checked on my progress when I had nearly completed 4 walls of a pink primer coat, so at best, the prospect of one blue coat looked grim.

I decided to start with the red paint. A few swipes of a brush and it was obvious the red wasn’t going to work with a single coat either. The red dried a bit before I applied the second coat, or should I say the coat that helped us reach the HALFWAY point with the red paint. At some point in this process Katie told me not to feel bad, that she had looked up online and others have had struggles when painting with red. I’m still uncertain what part of that encourages me to “not feel bad”.

Needless to say, with hours of struggling with red paint behind me, painting with blue on top of the red primer seemed nothing short of jumping from the top of a tall cliff, there was just no indication of a happy ending. But struggle I must, it was for my boy. So I dipped the brush in the blue paint, took a wipe across the pink primed wall, and who could have guessed – it went on just as blue as a new Thomas the Train chugging out of a Chinese toy factory – minus the lead.

The job isn’t perfect and worst yet it isn’t done, but you can start to see a bit of Thomas in the room. More importantly, you can start to see some joy in a little boy’s face and memories that will surely be created in Elliott’s new room. But at the risk of doing what I make efforts daily to avoid, pushing the fast forward button on my little man’s life, I think I will like it when the red and blue of Thomas get coated over with the blue and gold of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.