The Curse of the Youngest

A friend recently blogged that her husband is stuck with the "curse of marrying the youngest" child in a family - what the youngest wants, the youngest gets. Natalia seems to have caught on to this early.

Recently, we've caught Natalia playing on our new computer while we are busy getting the big kids ready for bed. (The youngest somehow goes to bed last.) We are slow learners, and it took her several days to teach us that we have to actually shut down the computer before bedtime, because she knows how to activate it from sleep mode. We thought the love for the computer desk would end once we cut off her private computer time, but Natalia merely viewed it as an opportunity to explore further. That's when we found her sitting at the computer desk, playing with pens. She wrote all over our check register. She found a sheet of postage stamps, and marked all over it. She was very thorough and made sure not to miss any stamps.

We have also found Natalia in the middle of the kitchen table recently. Not leaning over, but actually on the table, and sometimes standing. Apparently the Thanksgiving decorations in the middle of the table are just to much fun to resist. However, we have to be careful in yelling at her, because when she is up there, she always jumps when we call her name. (We also used to have the same problem with Leon when he was about this age. He would stand on his tiptoes on the arm of the futon in the play room in order to reach the top of the play kitchen. We learned to always let him finish, and THEN yell at him for being dangerous. Funny how that never seemed to prevent him from doing it.)

Recently Natalia also snuck out to a garage, a place she is not currently allowed to visit since it is the storage room of doom. She finally came stumbling back into the house, hugging the kids' little potty. She sat it in middle of kitchen, pointed at it, and said, "Pee!" Despite her choice of locations for the potty, we actually moved it to the bathroom. Since it's been there, she has sat on the potty several times and peed in her diaper. She has also made us late to places on multiple occasions. Each time while I was busy buckling the big kids into the car, she stayed behind in the house. When I come back in the house to get her, I've found her in the bathroom with her shoes off and her pants down while she frantically tugged on her diaper. There was no leaving until she actually tried to go to the bathroom. She did actually go in the potty one time. She was not impressed. But on another day, she came shuffling through the house with Leon and Michael's Angry Birds underwear around her knees. To explain herself, she proudly told me, "Panties!"