Daddy vs Stella

Written by Dan:

We've begun casually encouraging Stella to start to play by herself a little, rather than needing to be constantly held or otherwise attended to. And she is starting to do so. But it comes with a catch. When playing by herself, she almost exclusively prefers to play with "adult" things, rather than her own toys. (Her own toys, like her books or her plastic balls, tend to be "played with" by handing them to us, and then staring, expectantly and indeed presumptuously.)

Her play with "adult" things, can, unfortunately, be summarized in one word from high school science class: entropy. Stella has become a destroyer of order, a devotee of chaos for its own sake. She has only limited interest in these "adult" objects individually, be they empty plastic bottles of spring water, or old newspapers thrown in the trash. But what she loves, for example, is to pull them out of the trash, carefully, and with purpose. And spreading them out around her. Only then, when an almost perfectly distributed mess has been created around her, will she crawl off, a job well done.

Her current fascination in this regard, illustrated above, is with the lower shelf in our pantry. The pantry is small and now, with Stella's food too, is always crowded. This drives me (Dan) crazy and I am forever re-arranging the contents to make them neater and less jumbled. But whenever the pantry is left open a crack, Stella will crawl over rapidly and begin pulling everything out: cans of black beans, bags of tea, organic rice, vitamins and what have you. She will pull everything off the shelf, dump it on the floor and then seek to remove the contents of any package that is open. All of this she will do with extreme concentration, silently and with purpose. Sometimes this will go on for 10-20 minutes at a time, during which she will be oblivious to anything around her. Yet she appears almost entirely disinterested in any of the objects: be they of irregular shape or with packaging that has unusual colors or drawings. All she wants to do is to create disorder out of order, to spread everything on the floor, as fully as possible. Above you see that she has gone so far as to remove even the individual cheerios from a foil bag that was previously inside a cereal box. Once all the items were as fully pulled apart and dispersed on the kitchen floor as far as possible, she crawled away and back into my arms...

Written by Katie:

I must note that Dan had just come home from the gym when these photos were taken. Also, it's Dan's fault entirely that she likes to toss things off the pantry shelves as he's been the one who has encouraged her to do it, not knowing this would evolve into one of her favorite things in the world. The can of organic raisins lives on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Stella hates raisins. That can cost about $10 so I was a little bit disappointed about that. But now that it's contraband on the pantry shelf, she'll pull it out, bite the lid and pop it off. Next, she'll spill them all over the floor while trying to choke (not literally) a mouthful down. She's very good with food so we're not worried about her choking, but it's funny because you can tell by her facial expression that she's conflicted. She hates the taste of the raisins but she can't not put them in her mouth after popping the lid off. It's as if she's trying desperately hard to like them.