Weird, mysterious, and funny things I've caught my kid doing

Audrey is at a very fun age now. She is incredibly curious and always seems to be on some kind of mission. It seems like she is constantly attempting new reckless ventures, just to see how they turn out. She has no sense of danger, no sense of risk, no thoughts of the future and no ability to feel embarrassment. She just ... does things. Dumb things. Funny things.

Here is a record of some of the more interesting things I've caught her doing lately:

She opened the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom and pulled out a box of tampons. My general rule is that if it's making her happy and it's not expensive, fragile, gross, or dangerous, she can pretty much play with whatever she finds. Which in this case meant that she happily crawled around our bedroom with a wrapped tampon clutched tightly in each fist.

Then she got one of the tampons open, removing it from the paper wrapper. I was curious to see how long it would take her to figure out how to eject the tampon itself from its applicator, but Jesse refused to let the experiment continue so the tampon and applicator wound up in the garbage instead. Undeterred, Audrey pulled it out of the garbage and continued playing with it.

Here she is testing gravity with empty toilet paper rolls she pulled out of the garbage. She holds them both up as high as possible and then drops them at not-quite-the-same-time. And is amazed to find that they then hit the ground at not-quite-the-same-time. This kid is gonna be a hell of a scientist someday. All you gravity-deniers, get ready to have your world rocked.

One time, she dragged her Baby K'tan (a sling for baby-wearing) all the way down the hallway so that she could see what happens when a Baby K'tan is placed in a toilet. Answer: lots of shouting and a very wet Baby K'Tan.

She dragged a pair of my shoes across a room so that she could put them on her Zany Zoo wooden toy. 

This is the Zany Zoo.

This is the Zany Zoo being stuffed with adult shoes for some reason.

I'm not sure what the goal was. She also regularly wedges blocks under the bead tracks of the Zany Zoo, for mysterious and unknown purposes. One time, I caught her putting Cheerios through a slot in the top of the Zany Zoo like they were coins into a piggy bank. I lifted up the Zoo to get the Cheerios out, and I found three pens, a hair bow, a baby sock, and a bottle cap. In addition to all the Cheerios, of course. I assume she was putting them all through the slots to keep the Zany Zoo Gods at bay.

She is constantly taking her socks off and hiding them.

She steals things and puts them in her treehouse. Her favorite item to squirrel away in there is the TV remote, but I've also found a package of baby wipes in there, shoes (both hers and ours), and a magnet from the refrigerator along with the piece of baby art it was holding up. And so many socks.

There are always non-balls stuck in the ball chute. A triangle block, a piece of Lego, a Jenga. I don't know how many times she's going to have to test the hypothesis "things that are not round will still be successful at rolling down the ball chute" but apparently the answer is 'at least 100 more times'.

Here she is trying to put a BOOK into the ball chute. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

She took two Halloween pumpkin wall hangings (one in each hand) and brought them upstairs. She had a lot of trouble climbing the stairs with them, but when I tried to take them away, she went absolutely bonkers so I let her keep them. As soon as she got to the top of the stairs, the pumpkin wall hangings were abandoned. No word on why they needed to be brought upstairs in the first place.

One of her favorite games is to try to put the lid back on my Nalgene bottle. She will sit and put the lid on the bottle then take the lid off the bottle then put the lid on the bottle then take the lid off the bottle for fifteen minutes nonstop. One time, I thought I would teach her how to screw the cap on and then unscrew it. NO. I screwed it a quarter turn, so it didn't come off immediately when she tried to take it off, and she became so enraged she knocked the whole bottle out of my hands and soaked both me and the kitchen floor. We don't play that game anymore. 

Every night, Audrey has a bath before going to bed. And every time we get her clothes off, she immediately takes off down the hallway like a little naked bullet fired from a gun. She crawls insanely fast without the restriction of clothing and diaper, and she laughs the entire time. Just crawling down the hallway at Mach 3 laughing like a lunatic. This happens every night.

She also enjoys standing up in the bath and trying to run and jump. This ends poorly.

Every morning, I bring her downstairs and change her diaper. We stop in front of the mirror hanging on the laundry room door, and I point at our reflections and say "look! It's Mommy and Baby!" She then says something that sounds like "baby" (it's a work in progress), and grabs the mirror and starts violently shaking and banging it against the door. She doesn't know who that baby is on the laundry room door, but she hates that motherf***er.

She wants everything that I am eating. Everything. If she decides she doesn't like something, she will pull it out of her mouth and either put it back on my plate, or drop it on the floor. She put a half-dissolved bran flake back into my bowl of Raisin Bran and I just ate it because f*** it, her body exists because I made it with my own, so I can't suddenly get squeamish about eating things that have been in her mouth.

What I will not eat, however, are pieces of sweet potato that she pulls out of her mouth and then squeezes through her fist like balls of Play-doh. Delicious sweet potato that I made just for her, I might add. Asshole.

Yesterday, I picked her up from daycare and then immediately got to work getting her dinner ready when we got home. But after spending all day at daycare, she didn't want to be left alone while I made her dinner -- she wanted Mommy's attention and she wanted it now. Cut to Audrey toddling across the kitchen towards me, crying, while clutching the book "Are You My Mother?" in both hands. And the cat's in the cradle with the silver spoon.

Oh, and this morning I caught her putting a bunch of Legos into Jesse's slipper. I didn't remove the Legos from the slipper. I'm pretty excited for Jesse to find them.

LEGOS YEAH BUDDY.

So, in conclusion: how's the parenting situation going? Pretty great, duh.