More D.D.

There are few things in the world my child loves more than water, string, and paper, or any combination thereof. [The mini-crossbow with suction-cup arrows she got from a magazine in the meantime might be giving the other bits a run for their money, though.] L.H. and I have seen a wide variety of mail games D.D. came up with on her own: Delivery Duck, who speaks in a robotic quack; Letter in a Bottle, which requires a full bathtub and an empty soda bottle; the Mail Basket, which is an Easter basket tied, with a string, to the upper railing on the stairs and hoisted up and down between sender and addressee; and your basic Mailbox, which started out as a Lego box, but through the power of D.D.'s imagination and a coat of paint, has become—a mailbox!

As I've been cleaning out D.D.'s toy boxes (a couple of Rubbermaid storage bins and a cardboard box left over from our trip to Texas at xmas), I have come across more bits of paper and pieces of string and yarn than a whole kindergarten art class could use in a year. Once I got all the string detached from her toys, I made a mental note to address the string tied to every knob, bed-rail, and handle in her room tomorrow. Too tired today. Frankly, I'm surprised she hasn't accidentally strangled herself by now.

Once I finished the first toy box, I was covered in dirt and glitter, so I felt filthy but glamorous. Fortunately the other boxes turned out to be much cleaner. Hoorah! The boxes are sorted and repacked, but I still have to go through a couple of shelves in the cabinet and the space under her playbed, then actually *clean*, like with the vacuum and a dustrag. A mother's work is never done.

D.D. should actually be helping me more, seeing how she has so much free time on her hands. I'm not talking about school vacation; she is restricted from tv over the weekend because she used up *an entire bottle of dishsoap* washing a toy tea set with only 3 place settings. L.H. and I still haven't figured out how she managed to do it: she was only out of the room 5 or 10 minutes, and there was no mountain of suds to indicate that *an entire bottle of dishsoap* had just been used up. She got punished because this is not the first time she's done something like this, and she's been warned not to do it. It is really frustrating to be giving her a bath and find that both the liquid soap and the shampoo bottles have been filled with water, so there is about 5% soap to 95% water. Aargh!

She has tried to be more helpful around the house to make up for it, like being my quiche-mixing helper and table-setter last night, but she's going to find that from now on, she's going to have more chores, if only to keep her out of trouble.