I Always Thought Mornings Were Dumb

There's going to be this window of time where every photo of Mila seems to include some sort of shenanigans. It seems only fair that I somehow document how it went down because, really, she's not a bad kid. She's also not free-range. It's more that she doesn't know how to filter her ideas and SHE IS SO FAST OMG.

She's a bolt of lightning on a hot summer day.

It all seems to go down in the mornings. For a while now, it has been IMPOSSIBLE to get the kid to sleep without me nearby. She has some sort of Mom Detection system installed because she always knows when I have left her side. It takes her between 10-20 minutes to figure it out, which basically means QUICK! IT'S A RACE!

I don't do mornings, for what it's worth. So this concept that I need to move as fast as I can before Mila wakes up is somewhat hilarious. It's like asking a sloth to run a 50 yard dash. I usually make it to the shower before she stumbles in and from there, things can go one of two ways.

There is a 50% chance that Mila will pop a squat in the bathroom and stare at me while I take a shower. Seriously. She just sits on the floor and stares. Quietly. She sits with her hands folded in her lap and silently stares.

And THAT is why we can't have a clear shower curtain. She's giving me a complex.

I'd rather get a complex than the alternative, though. The half of the time that Mila doesn't sit and stare is the half of the time that she goes and finds things to entertain herself. In the past few weeks, that has included lip gloss (twice!), eyeshadow, a permanent marker, undecorating a Christmas tree, and countless other bad ideas.

This morning she pulled a hat trick. She managed to do the sit and stare thing but then took off right around when I grabbed the bottle of conditioner. Before I could rinse, she had unwrapped a Christmas gift and given herself fancy eyebrows.

It couldn't have been more than two minutes. She is THAT fast.

In about 30 years, Mila will tell tale of how her mother used to lock her in a cage every morning. It won't be a lie. It will have been for her own good, though. I'm worried that her next step might involve giving herself a tattoo.