She is Truly Amazing

Wayne and I joke that Marissa is "our boy," and in many ways, she is. She is rougher, tougher, more active and all around more "boyish" than Lindsey was at this age. By this age Lindsey was already loving skirts and dresses and wanted all things pink and purple. The last time we tried to put a skirt on Marissa she tugged at it and yelled "Off! Off!"

But I digress...

Tonight she got into an incredible amount of trouble in the shortest time span I believe ever accomplished by a toddler. This evening we were having our usual dinner time craziness, trying to get dinner on the table while keeping two children from pestering each other, the dog, or us. I had to wash Lindsey's sheets this evening (she'd had an accident in her bed that morning), so the two girls were playing nicely on Lindsey's bed while I ran the sheets down to the basement and into the wash. I was gone perhaps a total of three minutes.

In that three minutes Marissa walked over to the hallway closet, opened the door, got out the jar of Mineral Ice (a version of Icy Hot), went back to Lindsey's bedroom, sat down on her mattress, managed to pry the jar open and proceeded to slather the stuff all over herself. Luckily she got the bulk of it on the mattress pad (which now ALSO needed to be cleaned) but she did manage to get her legs, feet and part of one hand.

When I came back upstairs she was still trying to slather it on while Lindsey was asking her to put some "lotion" on her. I immediately picked Marissa up and threw her in the bathtub, clothes and all, in an attempt to get the stuff off of her before it started to activate. I think I was fairly successful, though I could tell it had started working because she was whiny for the next 15-20 minutes after her bath.

It's difficult to know which things to keep out of Marissa's reach because:

1) Marissa's range of reach continues to amaze us.
2) We are running out of closet space that's 5 feet or higher than the ground, which is apparently Marissa's reach.

Even the mundane things that we believe are "safe" to store on lower shelves are proven to us to be not so safe. She has pulled apart entire rolls of paper towels, entire rolls of toilet paper (directly into the toilet, mind you), emptied out newly-opened Kleenex boxes one Kleenex at a time, managed to pry open various food items, i.e. applesauce, fruit cups, and splash or wear sticky juice all over the kitchen.

One time she dropped an applesauce cup and it landed right-side up on the floor. You would think that that would be a good thing, except the "splash" of the applesauce reached our ceiling, the upper extremities of our cupboards, the top of the microwave, top of the frig, the underside of the handle on the oven door, and so on and so forth. We're still finding places that we missed the first five times we looked for applesauce splashes.

So if you're visiting with us and you see Wayne or I get visibly nervous when Marissa is not within eyesight for 2 minutes or less, and there is too much stillness coming from the general direction in which she last was seen, you will excuse us if we suddenly jump up to run and see what she's gotten herself into now.