Monkey See, Monkey Do!

My two kiddies love to play together. Whatever one of them does, the other one must do it too. The other day they decided that they needed to take turns climbing on the shelf in my closet. I didn't expect them to be as good of friends as they are. It is really fun to watch them play so cute together.

Ode to my Swivel Sweeper

Ahhh...5 o'clock. It's that special time of day when mom is trying to make dinner and all of the sudden she has fussy, whiny kids who need her complete and undivided attention. Thankfully, the baby will usually take a nap during that time, which is so helpful. My little Ameliah, though, has a hard time. Bless her heart. She will usually stand at my feet and ask for food. When I tell her that I am making dinner she says, "But I don't want dinner, I want cheese" or she'll ask me to hold her, or to come watch a movie with her. I try to be patient and come up with activities she can do; anything to get her out from under me. Well, two nights ago she found her own entertainment...

...which was dumping out my entire can of oatmeal. I was so busy with dinner that I didn't notice at first. I was just relieved to not have someone tugging on me. When I saw it my eyes got big and I gasped. She jumped up right away and backed up into the wall and said "I don't want a spank Mom, I don't want to get a spank". By that point the shock wore off and I didn't want to spank her, I wanted to laugh at her. I grabbed my camera and when I got back, she had already figured out how to use the lid to scoop it up.
The next time I looked over, the radius of the oatmeal had spread and the can was upside down, so any clean up that had been done was now undone.
Then she employed her shoes as a scooping device, which I didn't care about as I had already decided that the oatmeal was un-salvageable anyway. I kept encouraging her to clean it up and she said she was, but it looked an awful lot like playing to me.
This last picture is of her admiring her "work". I couldn't be too upset, because she was so distracted with "cleaning" that I was able to make dinner without any more interruptions. If oatmeal wasn't such a powdery pain to clean up, I might consider letting her do it more often. Well, as long as Cannon is asleep, anyway. I can't even imagine the wreckage that would have occurred if he were there too!

When I was done preparing dinner, I scooped up what I could then I pulled out my Swivel Sweeper (or Nimbus 3000 as Becky has named hers) and quickly vacuumed up the rest. I just want to give a shout out to Jodi for introducing me to the marvel that is The Swivel Sweeper. We (swivel and I) first met when I moved back to Arizona from Illinois. Jodi had an extra one that she gave me. And thus began a meaningful and lasting relationship between my Swivel and I. What would I ever do without my Swivel Sweeper?