Experimentation

You hear that toddlers and preschoolers can be forces of chaos and destruction. I read a blog post recently by one of my favorite bloggers about her toddler who took a pair of scissors to their sofa and his preschool-aged brother who tried to tape up the evidence. In general my children do not do these things. I have to count my blessings as they come.

However, in the past week Ava has taken a crayon to our basement playroom wall. Crayon over about four feet of one of the beautiful walls in the playroom with the gorgeous murals painstakingly painted by their grandfather and a good family friend over about 5-10 total days of work spread out over a couple of months. This picture is of one small section. I have not yet tried to remove the crayon. I've never needed to before. Do I just take a wet washcloth to it?

Then after two hours of not napping, I went upstairs to fetch Michael and discovered that he had stuffed multiple wads of toilet paper into the bathroom sink drain (which is missing the little drain cap thing that should be there). I did manage to extract them with my good tweezers. Then his father noticed that he had apparently used a hard object to bang a series of dents into the drawer of the nice bedside table in his room.

All children seemed appropriately regretful when the error of their ways was pointed out to them and we’ve had no repeats. Still, where on earth is this coming from?