She came, she saw...

Forget musical chairs - Rimonit has begun a game of tactical chair. She now realizes that her little orange chair is not only something to drag around, something to sit on and something to put her favorite toys and/or food on, but also something to give her some much-desired (on her part, at least) extra height.

We don't object when she drags her chair over to the old coffee table, which is just that little bit higher than she can comfortably scale on her own, to help her climb onto it. (This is okay with us partly because she's very good at getting down nicely on her own and partly because it's not very far off the ground in the first place.)

But it's a different story when she tries to conquer the dining table, that catchall of newspapers, books, earrings, dirty dishes and a random collection of other stuff that gets cleared off every Friday only to miraculously become just as jumbled a mess by Sunday (to W's dismay). While we have slowly (and, admittedly, not consistently) been getting used to moving things away from the dangerous border zone of the table's edges, the middle of the table has become one of the few sacred spaces left where we can put things without too much fear they will end up in the Smunch's wagon.

(One of W's colleagues learned this the hard way, when RP was making a run for the open door while clutching his wallet, which he had inadvisedly left on the coffee table.)

But now Rimonit very deliberately pulls her chair up to the dining table and stands up on it, wearing a look of thrilled wonder at this whole new world of previously hidden - and eminently desirable - objects. Sometimes she pulls up next to a wooden big-people chair and climbs onto it from her chair to give her even more height. This, of course, is bad news for us.

Yesterday, not wanting her to hang out there but also not wanting to spark a temper tantrum, I stood next to her for a bit to monitor which objects were in her reach, then nonchalantly started playing with some of her favorite toys, away from the table but well within her line of sight. By the time I had placed one of her toys on her wagon and pushed it up and down the living room a couple of times, she started getting interested in what was going on over there, climbed off her chair and grabbed my newfound toys away from me. Phew! Crisis averted, til next time...