Budding artist?

So Kellen has decided to express himself artistically lately. Only in the not-so-good way.

Saturday morning I wake up to the realization that he's found a green marker in his room and colored all of the fingers of one hand (don't ASK me how). I took a deep breath and decided to laugh that one off....then thought for a second and asked the question, "Kellen, what ELSE did you color?"

Kellen looked at me, then looked down, and sheepishly answered, "My bed."

I wasn't laughing on that one, as I worked REALLY hard with the soap and scrub brush to get the very artistic green marker off of his headboard. His ENTIRE headboard. I will say though, it was an interesting pattern.

*sigh*

He DID tell the truth, which meant he didn't get in as much trouble as he would have if he would have lied, so his discipline wasn't as bad as it could have been - a lesson which Daddy was certain to reiterate to him. Now, we don't want him to think telling the truth equates to a "get out of jail free" card, but we do want him to understand that telling us the truth means a lesser punishment than lying to us and us finding out the truth later.

Fast forward to a day later. Yes, you read that correctly - TODAY. We're back from church tonight and I'm getting Kellen ready for bed when I see some new strange markings on his headboard. I should know that they're new, since I just scrubbed that bright and fresh yesterday, right? This time they're red (and again very interesting-looking - he IS quite the artist!).

So I called Kellen to me and asked him about this newest of artwork. He proceeded to tell me that he colored on his bed during nap with a red crayon. (I REALLY thought I had gotten all of the possibly offending coloring-type items OUT of his room!! REALLY!!) We then have yet ANOTHER talk about taking care of our belongings, what we are allowed to color on and what we aren't, disobeying Mommy and Daddy, resting and sleeping vs. playing during naptime, etc.

I walk out of the room to cool down, and when I walk back in he had gone into the bathroom, gotten a washrag, and was scrubbing the bedframe - in a different spot than the one I had noticed. Apparently he had colored in TWO spots, but was taking it upon himself to try and start cleaning it up.

Atta' boy.

At any rate, thankfully crayola crayons DO come out of wood (mostly), so I was once again able to (for the most part) clean up the incident. But wow...twice in as many days. I do not know what has come over him!

Add the coloring incident to the fact that he ripped the stylus off of the string on his Leapster this evening when we got home from church - yes, ripped it off - and I'm at a loss here. When asked why he did that, his reasoning was very OCD, "I just don't like the string sticking out." I had a vague awareness that the string bothered him, but nothing to this extreme...

Do we need to allow him to act out at home so that he can maintain his good behavior at school? I can't expect him to be perfect all of the time, and would rather have him misbehave at home, but I can't let him just get away with everything at home, either.

This parenting gig...wow. So it seems like I need to provide more creative and artistic outlets for Kellen during the day and keep all possible writing utensils OUT of his room during nap and nighttime. The kicker to that idea is that I did just that - on Friday night (the night prior to incident #1) he made the two most wonderful pictures with his markers for me that I think he's ever done - and he did them right before bedtime...so it is a timing issue?

Lord, please help us with this...I can't stand for him to be in trouble with us every day...it's not good for him and it's so hard on us!