Could be worse. Somewhere between 18 months and 2 years, my younger girl got really into putting things away. She was totally fascinated by the idea that some things go inside other things. “Put away” was one of her earliest phrases.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t especially discriminating about what things got put away inside what other things.
A lot of stuff disappeared.
Lol, oh dear. When my nieces were one they were playing together, and one kept putting toys away in things while the other one tipped them out again. It was perfect.
Has your daughter grown up to be super tidy?
Every toddler’s sacred motto.
Did she eventually progress to putting things on top of other things?
Again, I’m not a parent. But one of my taglines for years as been “It’s a darn good thing they’re cute, or else they’d never survive to puberty.” Because boy are they good at frustrating the big people.
My niece calls her 6- and 2-1/2 year old the “miniature humans”. As in “We can yak for half an hour while the miniature humans nap, then you need to leave so I can feed them.” I like that term; calls to mind Dr. Evil’s comically diabolical Mini-me.
Conversation I had with my 3 year old:
Me: What’s this?! [Picks up empty bowl off the floor that normally holds all my house/car/etc keys]
Daughter: That’s the bowl where the keys go
Me: I know that! Where are all the keys?!
Daughter: [shrugs] You lost them.
It’s a stage they go through. It’s like seeing a cat or dog behave in a human way, but even more amazing, because they actually look like miniature humans. Babies look like babies and behave like babies, then somewhere … this transformation takes place, and when they aren’t playing you, they act like little adults – (easily tired little adults). They wander into preschool like they’re joining a cocktail party, saying hello to their friends and heading over to the canapes.
Then when they get older, they turn into children.
A telling fact is that even when they interact with the world and with their friends as adults, they mostly don’t treat their parents that way. The parent/child interaction develops a different dynamic. And I suspect that a lot of “childish” behavior is learned too.
My son put a frozen waffle into the VCR tray. It was a good fit, actually.
My sister once poured flour all over the cat while my mother was baking. Strangely enough, the cat didn’t even seem to give a shit.
My son once put chocolate syrup on the cat, then followed up with a box of Jello.
Another time the painter left a paint can open and walked outside. The same son put both hands and arms into the paint and “helped.” He went under the drop cloths and painted the furniture.
Baby has just acquired a horrifying new habit. Earlier I left a book on the floor and she tore off part of the last page and started eating it. Then when we had her in the lounge later she pulled a book off the shelf and did the same thing. Nooooooooooo! How will we keep the books safe now?
Get rid of the baby.
/that was tongue in cheek/ put the books up higher. Only broccoli and teething biscuits on the lower shelves.
I’m worried the bookcases may be unstable with all the books up high, although they are attached to the wall now. Perhaps some teething boulders on the lower shelves…?
Also, two days ago my partner taught the baby to climb the stairs, and today I nipped up to fetch something and met her climbing up as I came back downstairs. This would not be so bad if she was able to get down again, but she still thinks she needs to go head first!
A staircase without a baby gate at both ends is a life-altering mishap waiting to happen once the sprog can crawl. The time has come to get those installed.
We’ve had one at the top since she started to shuffle herself forward. I didn’t think we needed one at the bottom.
My nephew couldn’t find his car keys one day so he and his wife looks all over the house for it. They finally asked their three-year-old daughter if she knew where it was. The girl when into her room and got her bag out from the dresser and the keys were in there. at least she remembered.
This triggered a memory. When my sister was about three, she became fascinated with keys, so my mom gave her some old, useless keys from our junk drawer. When my parents friends heard about this “hobby”, some of them brought over some of their junk drawer keys.
We lived in a house right next to my uncle’s business (a small cement plant), so there was a lot of heavy equipment and trucks around. It was a very rural community, so the practice was to leave keys in vehicles when they were not being used. One day, my uncle and his employees arrived at work and discovered that they couldn’t get started because there were no keys in any of the vehicles.
They were searching the shop and my uncle came over to talk to my mother about whether she had heard or seen anything suspicious the night before. Now, my mother is no dummy, and my sister was her third kid, so she immediately turned to my sister and asked her if she had taken any of uncle’s keys. My sister replied with a very innocent no. Since my sister had literally never told my mother a lie, the matter was dropped.
Later that day (after my uncle had already started paying for replacement keys), my sister was playing in her bedroom and my mother went in to check with her. She was in her closet with a huge pile of keys and key rings. That was the first (and only) spanking my sister ever got.
Many years later, my sister confessed that this wasn’t a toddler innocently picking up some shiny toys, it was a caper. She knew, from playing around my uncle’s lot, that all the vehicles had keys in them. She remembers going out at dusk, just after almost everyone had gone, and creeping from vehicle to vehicle, in the shadows (“like a ninja” she said years later), stripping the vehicles of their keys and then sneaking her booty back into the house.
When my daughter was still in diapers, she’d play with (clean) wipes. She loved playing with them. I could give her a few of them and she’d play with them for hours, long after they had dried out. The majority of the time, she’d put them over her finger tips so they looked like long hair. That’s confusing…it was almost like she’d make finger puppets out of them.
What I always found amusing is that people would typically be annoyed with me about it for one of two reasons. They’d either suggest I was a bad parent for letting/making/allowing/forcing her to play with wipes all day, even though it’s what she wanted to do. IMO, that would be like giving a kid a new toy and then taking away the box that they so clearly want to play with. WTF cares, she’s happy, I’m happy, it’s amusing, let her be.
Or, they’d tell me I was being wasteful for letting her play with all these wipes. Keeping a 3 year old entertained for hours at a cost of about a nickel seemed like a pretty good deal.
And just to be clear, I was more amused than anything else over how upset people would get about this.
And to make it even more amusing, those people (many of them family members) found themselves on babysitting duty from time to time and it was always funny when I’d go pick her up at their house and find her with wipes on all her fingers and I’d get to do the ‘see, do you understand now’ thing. She was perfectly content for hours for the cost of a few wipes.
It’s dangerous to trust a gate at the top of the stairs. Did you not read the instructions on the unit???
Putting a teatowel over her head and spinning around. “I’m a tea-towel! I’m a tea-towel!”
I visited a friend and threw a tea-towel over her daughter’s head, and she did the same spinning around thing, then brought over her cousin who did the same, then they fought over the tea-towel till we got a second one.