Monkey Girl

I've been calling the kid a monkey, but it occurs to me that she's really more like a baby Spiderman.

We had this house Jaynie-proofed. It was safe to leave her unattended in just about any room. Not that we left her alone a lot, but it was nice to occasionally go to the bathroom without an audience and not have to worry about what she was doing.

All that has changed, ever since she started moving around the house VERTICALLY.

She climbs anything and everything. She climbs the chairs to get on the dining room table. She climbs the bar stools to get on the kitchen counter. She climbs the futon to (attempt to) get on the windowsill where George is napping. Her greatest climbing feat, however, had to be the changing table.

She's in her room, Joe and I are in the dining room. I'm showing him the broken pieces of some cute little ceramic pots that she climbed up and destroyed earlier that day. I say to him "You should probably go see what she's up to right now - it's awfully quiet in there." and he says (naively) "She's in her room - she can't destroy anything."

A few minutes later he goes in and I hear "Jennifer? Why is her lotion on the floor?" Apparently, he found her squirting lotion onto her belly and rubbing it in (all the while, chanting "lotion! lotion!"), and assumed I had left it where she could reach. Well - I hadn't.

Me: "Ummmm... did she climb the changing table to get it?" (We keep lotions, ointments, wipes, etc on a little shelf that is mounted to the wall ABOVE the changing table. Seriously - it's got to be almost 6 feet off the ground - I have to reach up for stuff.)

Joe: (Makes some kind of disbelieving snort. He's so sure that I left it out and just forgot.)

So, we put the lotion back where it belongs, sit back, and watch. We watch our little monkey climb the freaking table like it's a ladder, then stand on the pad, reach up, get the lotion, and start to climb back down.

Nothing is safe. Nothing.