<em>Maaaybe</em> a Five Year Old...

I've taken to hiding my shampoo whenever Kelly takes a shower. She uses it as body soap, and has on one occasion gone through half a bottle of Prell in one session. So I leave her shampoo in there, and a bar of soap, for if she's feeling adventurous.

So tonight she's showering, taking her sweet time and pouring all the hot water down the drain (Jean is somehow puzzled at how high our gas bills are), but otherwise doing her business. I in the meantime am in the den reading Slashdot . Eventually, she climbs out of the tub, and I go in to check on her. The tub is full of water. Soapy, murky, kinda cloudy water.

Kelly saw me looking at this mess and asked me "why isn't the water going down?"

"I don't know. Something must be clogging it. I guess I'll have to use the plunger." I speculated that it'd just reached it's threshold of Kelly hair and needed loosening. Then I noticed that the soap tray was empty. "Kelly, what happened to the new bar of Ivory soap I had there?"

"I used it to wash myself."

"All of it?"

"Yes. Some of it I used to wash my hair, and then I washed my body, and under my nails..."

By this time I'd reached for the plunger and given a few good yanks on the handle. Many pea-sized fragments of soap came shooting out. Ugh. She'd basically destroyed an entire bar of soap, and most of it was lodged in the drain. I was thinking back to when this sort of thing was more common, when Kelly could take care of herself a little, and that was when she was five!

So I gave her a lecture in a calm voice while trying to get chunks of soap out of the tub, but I was thinking to myself, 'where did that come from?' Jean has a theory that whenever Kelly is about to undergo a cognitive 'spurt', she first regresses a little, acting more immature for a few days or a week, then bam!, one morning she wakes up and we get a girl who's a year older. Well, I'm looking forward to this next leap!