What Keeps Makayla Busy?

FIVE things that can provide hours of entertainment at our house:

1. Letting the cats in and out.

One minute, Makayla thinks they need to go out and get some fresh air and the next minute, she thinks they need to come back inside. She spends her time calling for the cats, that eventually turns into a yell because they are either tired of going in and out or are very confused and they just end up sitting outside staring at her. When she’s standing at the door, beating her legs and doing all she can to persuade the cats to come back in for the 5^th time, I can’t help but grin at her persistence and big girl behavior taking care of her babies. There’s nothing - absolutely nothing - I can do to get her to stop tending to the cats. She’ll stop when she’s ready to stop.

2.  Sneakily feeding us bugs.

Makayla puts a fake bug in our popcorn bowl and we pretend to eat it. Then we dramatically spit it out and she falls to the floor laughing so hard she can’t breathe. We can do that over and over again and it’s as funny the 100^th time as it was the 1^st time.

3.  Rolling play dough into snakes.

The other day, Aunt Nina made a heart out of play dough and asked Makayla to guess what it was. Makayla guessed pretzel. I can totally see how a heart looks like a pretzel! I wish it was as easy for me as it is for her to think outside the box! 



4.  Cleaning the countertops.

 Makayla will pull a chair up to the kitchen counter and she will scrub away ‘til her hands are tired. She’ll scrub with a paper towel (wet or dry), a bib, Kleenex…anything she can find - but her favorite thing to clean with is a baby wipe. What’s really cute, although it makes a bigger mess for me, is when she really gets into. She’ll grab her bottled water, pour water on the counter, and clean clean clean.  Every once in awhile, she'll add her shampoo to the mix.  She’ll wipe and scrub for as long as I’ll let her. …and it’s not just the countertops. She also loves to clean the wood floor. Sometimes I’ll see a pile of baby wipes in the corner and I can’t help but smile because I know exactly what she has been doing.

These are the piles of wipes I find strategically placed throughout the house.  Most of the time, she's pretty good about throwing her dirty wipes away...

5.  Building cages.

Makayla will open up books and carefully place them on their side . She lines up to 15 books in a circle and calls it her cage. Sometimes, she likes to cage herself in, but most of the time, it’s her baby brother that she’s caging in. THEN, when he grabs for a book and knocks it down, she gets upset and has to start all over again. She’ll lecture him and tell him not to touch her books or knock down her cage…but poor babies…Mason doesn’t understand and Makayla doesn’t understand that Mason doesn’t know what she is talking about. This can go on for a good 30 minutes. The other day, Makayla caged her grandma in. I think she had maybe 20 books all lined up on their side. Eventually, grandma got too claustrophobic and, sadly, had to end the game.