Today is a hang around the house day. Tom's got a cold and has gone back to bed for a while. Max is at my feet. He's going downhill fast and won't be with us much longer. Charlotte has been making a personal project of knocking things off the table for a couple of weeks.
Sometimes they just fall off as she steps next to them or plays with something else. But, sometimes she stops and purposely pushes them off and watches them fall. So, I'm kicked back, watching Pioneer Woman on the Food channel and playing Solitaire on the laptop when I start hearing a strange metallic sound ... it repeats. It changes in intensity and a little bit in pitch. What the ... ?
Charlotte had knocked a box of rocks (small pieces of rock and petrified wood, souvenirs from some of my work travels (nothing collected in any park) off the table. With so much having been knocked off and her thirst for new experiences, she finally had realized that a dozen or more of these small rocks had fallen inside the baseboard heater unit. (Our baseboards are hydronic, not electric, so no fire danger.)
She loves jingly things. While the rock on heater fins isn't exactly jingly, it's close enough for her. She clearly was going to spend a lot of time fishing one rock or another out of the unit and dropping it before it was quite out ... oh, what lovely sounds to her ear. No so lovely to my ear.
So, I cleared off a chair, laid down on it on my belly (one of my least favorite positions) to pull out those rocks, one at a time. The opening is almost wide enough for me to reach in. Almost means that once I had a rock in my fingers it was hard to get my hand back out. Again and again and . . . so now I have a sore hand, with scrapes and red spots. But I think I got all the rocks out of the baseboard.
What's the next things she'll focus on? Only time (and not much of it) will tell.
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