Packrat

I had my suspicions early-on, the occasional stray cookie in the diaper, an errant earring placed in unusual places like my shoe or the unmatched socks found en masse under a pillow. These incidents were, however, just a small prelude to the real show... Much like the development of her speech has become quite impressive over the last year so has the development of her pack-rat nature.

Exhibit A: Last week I was looking for the charger to my kindle. (This was after Evie was asleep so I couldn't just ask her directly.) Patrick suggested that I look inside the printer because he has seen Evie hiding things in there. So I opened it up, and lo and behold there was a bookmark, a pamphlet on xeriscaping and some old law school notes of Patrick's... no charger though (Clearly we don't use the printer very often!) Knowing that there are an almost infinite number of crevices in our house I decided to wait until Evie was awake on the off chance she would remember where she placed it. The next morning I explained to her what I had lost, she stopped and thought about it for a few seconds, and then walked into her room, dug into the little cubby space under her dolly stroller and handed the charger to me. Also with the charger was a washcloth, two hair ties and a wood triangle.

Exhibit B: Evie loves purses. She has about three at any given time that are stuffed with all sorts of errata. The other day she came up to me with one of the purses (which of course is (strike that, was) my purse in the first place) hands it to me and with a big grin tells me that it is a present for me. I open the purse and inside find: a used tissue, an ornament, half a wooden orange, a twist tie, a spoon and a crumpled piece of paper. If this was a present put together with me in mind, I am not quite sure what that says about what my daughter thinks of me...