Abby has always been my easy child. She is very compliant and sunny-dispositioned. She plays really well with others or on her own. In fact, I have often seen her go upstairs to play with her dollies and stay up there for nearly an hour playing quietly in her room. She has not often been a source of anxiety for me. But she recently discovered mischief and has had a bout of it so far consisting of three incidents occurring within a week of each other.
The first was in California at Adel's cousin's house. Abby had been upstairs playing for a while and when I finally went to check on her she had painted globs of colored lip gloss on her cheeks and eyebrows. She wouldn't look me in the eye when I came into the room. Hmmmm...an isolated incident? Perhaps, except that it was followed days later at Mimi's house in Texas by incident number two:
Abby and her younger cousin Amelia had been upstairs for a while and the older kids were downstairs with us. Lindsay said to me, "Do you think we should be concerned that our two youngest children are off on their own?" I shrugged it off but Andy, the diligent father, went upstairs to check. Abby came down moments later, covered in white paste that I later discovered via smell that it was toothpaste. She had used the toothpaste to paint her arms, legs, and face, as well as her younger cousin and various pieces of furniture. I failed to get a picture of Abby because I immediately went into chaos management mode and cleaned her up. But here's at least one pic of the damage to a nightstand:
Lindsay had to scrub pretty hard to get the toothpaste out of the grooves of the clock.
And finally, as if incident #2 wasn't enough to put me on the alert, I again failed to keep a close eye on Abby as the family lounged outside in Mimi's backyard. The grownups were enjoying some peaceful quiet (no, never a good sign). When suddenly Andy (yes, he is the only attentive parent among us!) followed the sound of giggling to find this:
The three youngest girls sitting in a pile of Mimi's pansies, which they had just been quietly uprooting.
This video clip misses Abby trying to blame the whole thing on Amelia (the youngest). So, we asked to see their hands so we would know who was involved (we knew it would be all three of them, but just wanted to force the confession out of blame-shifting Abby). In the video, you can see Abby hiding her hands, but stealthily checking them out to look for evidence of dirt. Apparently she decided her hands were clean enough and eventually got the guts to show them to us triumphantly. Traces of dirt were still there, however, and she was found guilty.
The little stinker. Now I'm afraid I can't trust her!
