Off to bed...

Ms. A has a penchant for mess making.  She can completely alter the landscape of a room in mere seconds.  I (usually with help from the boys) generally attempt to repair the damage after she has been tucked in.  This evening however, with the boys still away at a soccer game with Johan, I decided to enlist Ms. A in "clean-up."  She initially dug in when I asked her to help put the train tracks away, but ultimately she did a fair job of helping.

When we got to the living room, she became distracted with wanting to eat and color.  So I managed a good clean-up.  Ms. A turned around and looking at our now tidy living room, calmly announced, "I need make a mess."  And she was serious!  She then set about re-scattering the odd assortment of items that she manages to find each day.  Lego men, crayons, golf balls, blocks, papers, she isn't picky...

I had to insist that the mess making was done, we were off to bed.  So I advised her, as I do almost every night, to get her bedtime things.  Every night she takes something different to bed.  Books, stuffed animals...you never know what she will bring

Tonight she gathered a classic assortment.  When she arrived bedside for story time she had the following:

It was all contained nicely in a Rubbermaid shoebox; K's favorite stuffed puppy that he slept with every night for many years, a random Beanie Baby iguana, an old Blackberry, a Lego tiger, and K's mason jar full of quarters.

She cracks us up.  She scatters so much stuff around the house, but she is always packing random collections of things into random containers; paper bags, boxes, Tupperware, baskets, etc.  I believe that last night she slept with K's puppy again along with a dead bug of unknown origin sealed in a  Tupperware container.