You may recall that when Leo and I visited my parents at Thanksgiving, my mother let Margaret sit in the car (parked) in the front seat.
She’s taken it a step further.
It’s the wrinkly nose that gets me.
*Except stopped. That’s pretty safe. Except we might die of cuteness overload.
As I mentioned, Margaret was trying to break into a corner of my parents’ living room, where they keep exciting things like fireplace tools and lamps and whatnot.
I reinforced the fence, but it did no good. She forced her little self through the cracks, and squirmed into the fenced-off area.
And she’ll just figure out how to get around that one too.
The story of this week has been one of the hasty construction of barriers around things that are apparently incredibly interesting. We put a chair in front of the vcr/dvd stack, and she discovered that she could open the doors to the entertainment center. We barricaded that, and she found that she could squeeze between the chairs and get to the fireplace stove thingy. We put another chair in front of that, and she found that if she squirmed behind that chair, and then put her hand on it for support, she could stand on the stove’s step and bounce up and down. When we solved that problem, she decided that she was going to go after the irons for the fireplace. So we put another chair in front of them.
This st- (pardon me, I had to go and move an occasional table to make a better blockade, and now she’s playing with the phone books that were on it) –opped her for a few hours, most of which she spent asleep.
Then she put her devious little mind to work on breaking the fire irons out of their exile.
She accomplished it. She’s a strong little person.
And then she set off to come up with some new mischief.
As I’ve mentioned, Margaret assumes that all objects are secretly phones.
Sometimes she gets lucky.
Also, I appear to have dressed her in living room camouflage, so I hope I can find her later.
Margaret has learned to undo her shoes, and take them off.
Apparently she is trying to learn how to tie them together. I really hope she doesn’t figure that one out any time soon, because she will fall over, and it will be funny, and I will feel bad for laughing at her.
I had great hopes this morning when Margaret picked up the dust pan. I thought that perhaps she would teach herself to clean, and I would never have to sweep again.
But it turns out that all she wanted to do was run around the circle of my parents’ house with it.
Still, she got up a pretty good head of steam; I think she’s trying to learn how to run.
At any rate, she’s learning how to run away. As this is Margaret’s virtual baby book (and if she gets miffy that I didn’t do an actual baby book, I’m going to get miffy myself, as this is far more comprehensive), I feel I ought to note that this week is the week where she learned to be bad. She goes and does things that she’s not meant to do – like sticking her hands into light sockets – and when I tell her to stop, pauses, looks at me, and laughs, before going right back to doing whatever wicked thing she was doing.
So there’s a milestone for you. I think she learned it from her Nana.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and build a more secure fence. Perhaps I will also read her The Poky Little Puppy for moral instruction. But I feel certain she would learn precisely the wrong lesson.
