Vandalism

The other night as we were sitting watching TV post dinner, a little criminal committed another crime. I mean, calling it a crime is a bit of a stretch really, since it was mainly only his stuff that was affected. Of course, I had to clean it up, I'm the one with thumbs and all.

Ah, the joy of thumbs.
Never ending.

Take a look for yourself:

As you can see, he upended the toy box and knocked everything out all by himself.

When he was done there was literally no toys left inside the box as they were strewn around the living room. I'm not sure what motivated him to do this, as he's never done it before, but it seemed like he got curious and then overjoyed.

His sister sat quietly, for a time chewing on her feet (she does that, thanks long haired dog allergies!) and then mainly just laying on a pillow. He just enjoyed the pleasure of being surrounded by all his toys at once. Using one of them at a time, but getting to them all in turn.

We laughed a good bit over it- it was entertaining to watch our tiny fella get industrious- even if it did make a giant mess of the living room. I tried to clean it all up twice, but he just kept repeating the process- he clearly knew what he wanted.

I thought it was a quirky thing that he did, and would likely never do it again.

The past 3 nights in a row he's repeated the process.
This was 2 nights later

Notice the pride?
Or at the very least the utter lack of concern for his behavior?

Yeah, he's pretty pleased with the situation.

He finds some sort of satisfaction in pulling things out one at a time and then flinging them throughout the room. And really, who wouldn't- it looks like tons of fun.

I'm actually shocked at Piper's lack of involvement in the entire thing. She has yet to help or intrude on it. She has taken a toy to play with, but never one that Odie is using at the time, and if he wants it back, she doesn't put up much of a fight (unless she wants him to chase her as a new game). She mainly just sits nearby and does her own thing. If you look really closely at the above picture, she's just licking her feet again. That's awesome.

The new challenge has become how to let the little monster have his fun without living in the toy aisle of a poorly cared for pet store. Some of these toys had never been looked at twice until this- and now he's in love with them all. It's another step closer to having an actual child- he throws toys all over, and I go around picking them up again. Hey, as long as he never becomes a belligerent teenager I'm ok with it all.

For now, I'll keep laughing at his "sneaky" ways and pick up the toys every night before bed. Maybe if we work hard on it, we can teach Piper to put the toys away and start a REALLY fun game.

For us.