Lately, Kate is on a very big "I can do everything by myself" kick. I will be exploring this theme in great detail in the newsletter I will write for her soon, but in the meantime, one of her self-initiated projects yielded some funny photos, and I thought I'd post them.

There are a lot of challenging things about Kate's new-found drive to do things herself, but one of the nice things is that she's insisting on helping me unload the dishwasher every morning. This isn't actually very helpful now, since her "helping" me means that I stand by the dishwasher while she lifts each individual plate, bowl, spoon, fork and whatsit out at a painfully slow pace and then hands it to me to be put away. It takes what I would estimate to be approximately one hundred years to get the whole dishwasher unloaded this way. Not to mention that I pretty much have to wash all the spoons again by hand since Kate insists on licking them before she hands them to me. (Not the forks. Only the spoons. I don't know why.) But I figure if I'm patient, she might actually learn to unload the dishwasher herself, and then I can hand the job over to her on a permanent basis and sit around painting my nails in all that free time. Sure, she'll basically be my little slave, but look how happy she is about it now:

After I took the above photo I was just kind of standing there with my camera, waiting for her to give me another individual spoon to put away, and instead, she started digging around in her purse, which of course she has to have on her shoulder in order to unload the dishwasher.

After a while, she came up with a set of keys. No, not her little plastic keys that came with the purse, but the actual keys to my actual car, which I did not know she had. She must have taken them out of my purse and put them into hers when I wasn't looking. And unless I had been watching her, I might now be shopping for a new remote clicker to unlock my car, because this is what she did with my keys.

Yes! Put them in the dishwasher! Where I always put my keys! Surely that would have been the first place I looked next time I was frantically searching for the keys.

Needless to say, I recently became the proud owner of an over-the-door hook upon which to hang my purse, high out of reach behind a closed door. But I would have had the cleanest keys in town if Kate's plan had succeeded.