Adorable

I can't imagine Penelope getting any more adorable than she is right now (yeah.. Ben is cute too - this one is about Penelope though). Somehow, she still manages to up the cuteness ante on a regular basis.  But she's also a bit of a toublemaker.  I fully comprehend the idea that kids are cute as a defense mechanism now. It can be really hard to keep a straight face, even when the "thing you don't want them to do" is unfolding before your eyes. She's often aware when she's about to do something wrong. Fortunately in those cases she's kind enough to warn us ahead of time by telling us to go to a different room or not to look at her (see? adorable). Other times though, she'll be the one leaving the room - that's when it gets dicey.

The one room she knows that she won't usually be followed into is the bathroom, which means that most of her mischief happens in there. If she disappears into a bathroom and you don't hear a toilet flush within a minute, or if the water in the sink is running for more than a minute, or if the singing stops and things are quiet (for a minute), you know *something's* up. You are probably in for a surprise when you investigate.

It might be that the toilet is filled with half a roll of un-rolled TP. It might be that the roll was unrolled quite a ways, and then rolled back up. It could be that the bubbles in the sink were just sooo beautiful that they had to be spread all over the place to make the rest of the room pretty too. Or it could be that she's using a toothbrush to apply lotion to her arms. You never really know.

A couple months ago, Penelope headed into the bathroom singing. The toilet flushed and the singing continued. The water ran and stopped, and the singing continued. She didn't stop singing, but she also didn't come out of the bathroom right away. I waited... about a minute, and then decided I had better check on her. I was expecting a mess of some kind - not a scare. When I got to the room, she was standing in the sink, doing a little dance and playing with the top of the mirror! Perhaps we encouraged that by putting one of those little miniature staircases in front of the sink. She didn't notice me come in, and it startled her pretty badly when I lifted her out of the sink yelling "NO!" Still, as momentarily terrifying as it was (for both of us), I have to admit that it was really cute. We put a much shorter foot stool in there and (I think) she hasn't climbed into the sink since.