As a preschool teacher, often I find myself running around all day cleaning up and preventing messes. On this snowy morning, I took a step back and allowed this student to remind me of an important lesson that I frequently forget in the chaos of the day - embrace the mess! I had put paint and paintbrushes out to distract my kiddos from the fact that it was too cold for us to play outside that day, and I found myself preparing to clean up every drop of paint on the table and prevent them from mixing everything together into a brown goopy mess. But when I took a step back and embraced the mess, I was able to witness the magic of this messy moment. I watched my students experiment with mixing different colors, figure out how to get the paint off of a paintbrush so they could start fresh, arrange insect manipulatives in rainbow order and cover them with different colored paint to change the rainbow, and use soap, water, and empty paint cups to wash the insects clean. Yes, the table was messy. Yes, their hands and smocks turned into smeared rainbows. Yes, the insect manipulatives were intended to teach counting and sorting and not as art supplies. Yes, they made just about every shade of brown they could. And yes, this was the most valuable learning activity we did that entire day. Embrace the mess!