Crawling

So Olivia is officially crawling now, which means -- as Dooce so blithely put it -- I'm screwed. She's mobile. Look out, world. I can no longer Set It (with a pile of toys) and Forget It. Now I must close the door.

We went to visit my friend Jessica and her girls today, and Olivia got to wear a princess dress. And I was relieved because it hopefully meant it would keep her in one spot. Negative! It just makes her try harder to crawl until she tears right through the layers of purple fluff. Fail! I took it off before that happened.

Jessica's cat just had kittens, so sweet! OJ couldn't have cared less. She's still in a scratchy-smacky-textile-explorative phase, so every object either gets scraped, hit, pulled, or put in her mouth. Olivia loves to grab glasses, jewelry, and hair. Loves to sit in the highchair and smack the tray. Loves to hit one plastic toy with another. Kitties? Not good for smacking. But the hardwood floor! Good for smacking... must... get... to... the... hardwood... She crawled across the carpet to the wood like she's been crawling for weeks. Note to self: Buy baby gates.

I'm starting to put outlet covers in and vacuum more. I may not bubble-wrap all the furniture, but I may clean up my piles of things. Yes, I am a piler. I have piles here and there, I know where everything is, and they've become permanent fixtures. Well Miss O loves paper, to crunch it and lick it and tear it, so the piles are finally getting picked up little by little. I am determined to get my house cleaner in general, and not because I am embarrassed. Most of the time I'm like, "Love me, love my mess," but I also love the way the house looks when it is clean so I'm going to try that for a while. Usually Q4 is super busy for my business, so I make no long-term promises.