Happy Mardi Gras

Lib was cleaning out a cabinet yesterday morning and she found a bag of green beads. As you can see Paige enjoyed playing with them. It started with her winter hats, but she enjoys trying to put things on her head. The green beads were no exception.

Although the beads were purchased for St. Patricks Day, with yesterday being "Fat Tuesday" and Paige getting into the spirit I wanted to share this picture.

Gated community

Paige, I hope you are enjoying it. While living with your parents, your current setup is as close as you will get to living in a gated community.

To be completely honest our version of living in a gated community provided very few of the benefited of other gated communities. According to eHow the top advantages of living in a gated community include:

1) No Through Traffic: While getting around the gate is difficult (we are currently in the market for a new gate that is easy to open so we can walk through) with a three year old sister there is no limit to through traffic. Lucy loves to try and climb over the gate or simply pull it down.

2) Security: The gate does provides mom and dad some peace of mind that Paige won't go down the stairs head first. It also allows her to crawl freely and mom and dad to be hands free for a bit each day.

3) Property Value: Any property value gained by having a hand me down, plastic ,removable gate on the top of our stairs (Spoiler Alert: Value added= $0 or less) is easily cancelled out by paint and food stains in the carpet.

4) Children's Safety: In a gated community I can understand how children can play easier with less cars and unknown people around. I don't get how the gate keeps kids on their trampolines (more on this story in a later post), chairs from tipping over, and small objects out of toddlers mouths.

The reason we "moved" to the gated set up is Paige's new love, borderline obsession, with climbing the stairs. Since she recently mastered turning around and going down the stairs feet first we have been having trouble keeping her off the staircase. Her up and down trips are quite cute and she is very proud of herself.

If I had my druthers as to which skill Paige would have worked on I would have picked walking or hitting her mouth with a higher percentage of her food. Nonetheless this accomplishment is noteworthy.

In the future if Paige ever has a job interview on the second floor it will be good that she can get up and down the stairs. Hopefully she doesn't crawl the stairs or reverse crawl down when that day comes!?!?! Also if the person interviewing her happens to mention that he or she lives in a gated community hopefully Paige will proudly respond, "Me too!"