To say that I'm not an artsy-craftsy kind of person is a bit of an understatement.

I have a difficult time even finding enough descriptive adjectives to explain how much I loathe anything related to artsy-craftsy stuff.I purchased a glue gun about a year ago, and have yet to use it successfully. Sure, things have stuck together. My fingers. My shirt to the table. The gun to the table. But darn it, the pants I tried to hem with it, those things will NOT stay put.My kids, on the other hand. Oh, my kids. Those monsters have never met a piece of construction paper that wasn't crying out to be cut up into a billion pieces of confetti.Glue sticks and boxes of crayons are on my weekly shopping list. They are capable of consuming five rolls of Scotch tape in a single afternoon.Don't even get me started on what they can do with glitter.After losing the refrigerator to the kids' copious amount of artwork, the Wonderful Husband had the brilliant idea of installing a small bulletin board for each of them in the hallway.When we were in the process of relocating the gallery, we discovered that they weren't satisfied to put their work up with magnets. Some pieces were actually glued right to the fridge door.I've tried hard to support their creativity. Every year, I rally for their ambitious endeavors in the school's annual arts and crafts contest. We take an afternoon and peruse the aisles at the craft store and they invariable talk me into buying much more than they need, because I have absolutely no idea what goes into what crafts.Last year, the boys decided to create a 3-D underwater diorama complete with a sandy bottom. Sand! More fun than glitter! A few years before that, A constructed a tyrannosaurus out of approximately 500 pipe cleaners.G once made a lovely vase out of about six cartons of Popsicle sticks. Popsicle sticks that are glued together tend not to hold water very well. Luckily, we were able to remove about a dozen pipe cleaners from our good friend T. Rex and make some flowers out of them so that the intent of the object d'art was a little more obvious.Then, there is Pinterest. I tried that. Once. In theory, it seems like a great idea. I initially thought it would be a great idea to organize recipes and home improvement ideas. Those are two things that I do enjoy dabbling in. It took me seven years to decide to paint the living room gray, though, so even when I do something involving paint, I tend to avoid pizazz.Once I created a "food kids will eat" board on Pinterest and it suggested lots of other things kids like, too. Like "fun" arts and crafts ideas! UGH! If my kids ever find Pinterest, I am in a lot of trouble.Even though I don't understand it, I am glad that they have this creative side. I know exactly where they get it from. My Gram would definitely approve. She was one crafty lady. Ceramics, macramé, bead work, floral arrangements, needlework, she could do it all.She put her talents to good use, leading craft classes at the senior center and working as an art director at a Girl Scout camp for many summers. She always had a little TV tray set up next to her with her latest project spread out on it.Some of her phases were great. I still treasure the ceramic dolls that she made for me, complete with hand sewn wardrobes, but the seven or eight sets of embroidered plastic mesh coasters may have landed at a yard sale.I do try to save some of the more meaningful pieces, but by child number three, you've seen one handprint turkey, you've seen them all. Of course, heaven help me if they find one of their "masterpieces" in the recycling bin.Things ended very badly when we finally got the boys trained to take out the garbage and the recycling and they noticed several fine pieces of their work were visible through the side of the garbage bag.We finally had to have a frank discussion: The artwork could live in our house or we could. I guess it's a good thing that the art bug skips a generation or two, because there certainly isn't any room in our house for another artist.Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.