"You know what I can't open? Cabinets!" "Can he say that?"

Of all the rooms in our house, the kitchen is the one where Abbie can make the biggest nuisance of herself; not that she can’t be a giant nuisance in other rooms. In her bedroom she can spread books across the floor, creating a protective barrier for the carpet, but I can easily pick those up provided she hasn’t shut the door and wedged a couple of “opposites” books under it, eliminating the “open” option in that matched opposites pair. She can be much more annoying in her bedroom by tearing apart her weak books or emptying the clothes from her dresser, but thankfully she rarely does, possibly because she hasn’t yet realized she can annoy me by doing so. In the bathroom she can make a massive nuisance of herself chewing on soap bottles and playing in the toilet, but unlike the kitchen we can just shut the door to keep her out of there. In our bedroom she could make an enormous nuisance of herself by getting into all of our fun stuff at toddler level, like clothes, Playstation, and jewelry, but we protect our room with our defense system of CLosely Unified Layer of Largely Unimportant Ruminants, or CLUTTER. We keep this CLUTTER permanently scattered across the bedroom floor so when she enters our room itching to touch all our pretty things, she realizes after a few steps that no object, no matter how enticing, is worth the bother of navigating this CLUTTER and resumes her previous activity such as chasing kitties. In the living room as long as the dog food is out of reach there’s very little she can do to make a nuisance of herself besides creating a carpet-protecting barrier with toys, but I can easily pick those up as well. Once she can throw a Weeble with enough force to break glass, like the glass on the front of the china cabinet, we may have to change our minds, but for now the living room has as much irritation potential as a movie starring one of the good Baldwin brothers (not Billy).

That leaves the kitchen as the room she can access with the most stuff to pry into, most of which is in the cabinets. I think I’ve previously detailed how she will get into the food storage containers and fling them across the room, but in case you need a refresher, she will get into the food storage containers and fling them across the room. She’s also quite fond of giving the same treatment to the nearby dishtowels. Having food storage containers spread across the floor is fine; they’re too light to cause injury* and I now keep the lids on at all times so no harmful floor germs find their way inside while on the floor. The towels, though, do need washing when they hit the floor as they readily absorb floor germs, especially when they come in contact with the nearby pet water. She also likes to rummage through the cabinet holding the pots and pans, but since those are too heavy for her move much so she can’t be too much of a nuisance in there. She can be a nuisance when she fumbles around in the cabinet that holds our long rolls of food wrappings, like aluminum foil and cling wrap. She loves pulling these long boxes out of the cabinet, an action that horrifies Ellie because every single box has a serrated edge to cut its food wrapping and could potentially cut Abbie. I find it kind of cute because once she pulls every box out of the cabinet, she tries to put them all back, and few things are funnier than watching a girl with the coordination of Colin Farrell at 4am struggle to put a box that’s as long as her through a narrow opening.

There are other ways to make a nuisance of herself in the kitchen, like meddling in the garbage can. She likes groping around in the garbage can and pulling out what she finds. This is bad enough when the top garbage layer is something innocuous like a mixture of credit card layers and expired coupons, but when discarded hamburger wrappings are on top, this can expose her to dangerous old food germs, and it’s really disgusting to clean. She’s also keen on pulling things out of the dishwasher, which is actually vaguely helpful when I’m trying to put away clean dishes. When I’m trying to load dirty dishes, though, it’s very aggravating to have to put every dish in its place twice, once when I move it from the sink, and once when I rip it from her hands while imploring her to go bother her mother, advice she rarely accepts. Plus dirty dishes are full of old food germs, which are 62% more dangerous than floor germs.

* The plastic containers are too light to cause injury. The heavier and presumably breakable glass ones are stuffed way in the back where she can’t reach. Yet.