Let the kids make a mess!

Picture a kitchen sometime in the 50's. There is a mother in the kitchen putting cherry pie filling into a pressure cooker. She loads up the cooker and intentionally sets the pressure too high and doesn't latch the lid tightly. On purpose! She turns on the pressure cooker. The pressure builds up and soon the lid flies off and, like a miniature volcano, the cherry pie filling is launched all over the kitchen, covering the ceiling and cupboards with thick dripping oozing red gunk. Later she will clean it up. She'll scrub down the ceiling, the counters, the floor, and the cupboards. She willfully exploded the cherries so that her 8 year old son could indulge his passion for filming movies. He wanted something that looked like blood dripping from the cupboards.
At the age of 13, her son is still shooting movies, charging 25 cents for the kids in the neighborhood to come see his movies while his sister sells popcorn. At 16, the boy writes and directs his first independent film and it is shown at the local movie theater and makes a profit of $100. A writer for the local newspaper expected great things to come from the young filmmaker.
Later in life he creates films called:
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
E.T.
The Indiana Jones Series
Poltergeist
Gremlins
Back To the Future
The Land Before Time
Jurassic Park
Schindler's List
Minority Report
Saving Private Ryan

Yes, the boy shooting horror films in the kitchen was Steven Spielberg. What a nice mom he must have had. I remember this story every time my kids ask me to do something messy. Who knows what great things they will do someday if they're able to follow their passions, however messy. I would have made him clean up the cherries, though!
Kristy