Third time\u2019s a charm, they say, and in our case the third time (aka Chiara) had better be a lucky charm because she\u2019s going to need it with her wild, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners behavior. I don\u2019t know what it is that makes Chiara so willing to push the envelope where her older brother and sister did not, but I do know that the girl has got more chutzpah in her left pinky than most people have in their entire bodies.<\/p>\n
Last night Chiara, who will not turn 3 until July 21, decided to exit the house via the garage and mosey on around the corner to the backyard where Dennis was putting lawn furniture back on the deck. I\u2019m amazed that she opted for this route and did not, for example, decide to wander down the street or into traffic. I\u2019m sure if she had any idea that those last two options were even feasible, she would have gone for it without a second thought. We\u2019re thinking about building a moat around the house, but that would just be a gift to her, one more challenging obstacle to figure out between breakfast and snack time.<\/p>\n
This third child of ours really should have come with some sort of warning, or at the very least a special instruction manual. Complete strangers will comment that she is a daredevil after being confined just five minutes with her in a place that has anything that can be used as climbing apparatus — chairs, drawers, boxes of baby wipes. She\u2019s tried them all.<\/p>\n
Just the other day, I put a two-day-old juice cup up on the second shelf of the hutch in her room to get it out of her reach until I could take it downstairs. When I came back to her room a few minutes later, said juice cup was on the floor — empty. I asked how she got the juice cup, and she said with annoyance, \u201cIt was on a high shelf.\u201d So I told her to show me how she got it from the high shelf. Apparently that\u2019s what those three dresser drawers were made for. Thankfully, her dresser is sturdy enough to support a monkey-like girl in full climbing mode.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll do it myself\u201d is Chiara\u2019s mantra, and she does, whether it means wearing her shoes on the wrong feet or spending 15 minutes getting onto the swing in the yard. I have to admire her confidence and determination, even if it does make me crazy and causes me to call on her guardian angels with an insistency I\u2019ve never before exercised in prayer.<\/p>\n
You know your kid is too adventurous when you come out of the shower and run down the hall not because you\u2019re worried she\u2019s awake but because you\u2019re worried she packed a bag and headed out of town. She\u2019s napping as I write this and the house is blissfully quiet, which can mean only one of two things: She\u2019s really tired or she\u2019s finally figured out the deadbolt on the front door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Third time\u2019s a charm, they say, and in our case the third time (aka Chiara) had better be a lucky charm because she\u2019s going to need it with her wild, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26,32],"tags":[29,27,74],"class_list":["post-5037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-original-nss","category-parenting","tag-chiara","tag-original-nss","tag-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\n