In all fairness, I had only been asleep three hours when the Storm hit. So when Randy woke me at 5 a.m. Easter morning, holding the Storm and her ink-stained hands in his arms and yammering about "the biggest mess she's ever made," I wasn't really paying attention. It was dark and fuzzy, both in the room and in my brain, and I was still recuperating from my three-hour decorating rendezvous with a Winnie the Pooh birthday cake and glitter-covered Easter eggs, while nursing a sugar hangover from the roughly 4 lbs. of chocolate I had eaten while filling MJ and Little L's baskets.

So, when I trudged down the hall and saw the first seven of MJ's hand prints on the walls of Little L's room, my first thought was, "Oh, how pretty." It was rather like the feeling I had had as I waited for the anesthetic to wear off after having my wisdom teeth out. Nothing was real, and everything was beautiful. She had painted a lovely mural on the baby's wall. "How cute," I thought. "(Yawn.) Let's go back to sleep now."

And then I had a look at the rest of the room, and I suddenly felt as if a bucket of cold water had been tossed over my head. It definitely needed to be tossed at the scene before me. Two closet doors, inside and outside, covered in hand prints. The back of the front door: six hand prints. The carpet: one hand print. The changing table: several well-placed smudges. The diaper genie: one print. The rocking chair: one. The quilt that my mom had made: one. A side wall: two prints, plus some Q-Tip drawings. The bottom of a basket that she had flipped over to use as a step stool to get to the nontoxic ink pad that I had hidden at the back of a high shelf after using it to capture Little L's prints : one hand print. The crib railings: two or three smudges. The crib sheet: 1/2 print. Little L: a smudge on her sleeve, and tears rolling down her face.

"Oh MJ," I said, looking down at her guilty mug," "this is bad. This is very, very bad."

This was not the first time we had found MJ in the baby's room in the wee hours of the morning; several weeks ago, after a series of loud slamming doors at 2 a.m., we ran out into the hallway to find MJ missing from her bed. She was in Little L's mostly dark room, sitting in the rocking chair, holding -- appropriately enough -- The Tale of Peter Rabbit. "Oh, hi Mommy," she had said, as though this were the most natural scenario in the world, "I was just reading baby a book."

After that, we didn't just shut MJ's door at night; we shut it and put a gate in front of it. A gate that I checked three times before I went to bed the night of the Storm. A gate that, at 5 o'clock in the morning, she apparently had climbed over to satisfy her artistic side, which is grandiose and all-consuming. No canvas is too strange (our couches are a particular favorite) and no medium is too difficult (diaper cream was once buttered on a piece of plastic toast, as well as elsewhere in her room; and we've lost more tubs of baby wipes to the artist's cause than broken crayons).

By 2 p.m., when our Easter/birthday party guests had arrived, most of the mess had been cleaned up -- except those first seven wall hand prints. So as entertainment, we took everyone on a tour of the gallery before dinner.

"She did kind of a nice job, didn't she?" my sister mused. "I mean, they're all so perfectly placed, so precise."

"I don't know," added my brother-in-law. "I think the hand prints kind of add something to the room. They just look like they belong there."

Wonderful. I have a budding artist. Now if we could only get the National Endowment for the Arts to pay for some touch-up paint.