BABIES. I swear to god, babies (yes I KNOW Gwen is a toddler not a baby but w/e).
Gwen realized this week that she could use her new Hulk strength to move the cardboard playhouse, which I’d been using to block her from getting into the drawers of craft supplies beside my desk. With this knowledge she became an unstoppable force of mess-making. On Wednesday morning I went to the bathroom, and when I returned she’d emptied a jar of heart-shaped confetti FRIGGING EVERYWHERE. There’s no use crying over spilled confetti though, so I just let her play with it (she attempted to eat it but quickly found it not to her tastes) while I set to work figuring out what the heck to do. I can’t supervise her every second of every day, and this is an open-plan apartment so there isn’t any way to keep her out of the office area. I’d already taken the knobs off the drawers of my actual desk but the craft supply drawer unit doesn’t have knobs, just super convenient cut-away handles that make it a breeze for babies to get all up in everything.
In the end I pillaged the child locks from the kitchen cupboards (the kitchen is safely behind baby gates), but I had to empty all the drawers out first, with my demanding child trying to clamber over me to get at the tissue paper and ziploc bags and spools of ribbon. She likes to grab the back of my shirt collar with one hand and dig her little claws into my neck with the other. It’s a real treat, so much so that I haven’t even started putting all my craft supplies away in my now-secure drawers.