Dress Up and Messes

This little girl LOVES playing dress-up. She is constantly draping clothes over her arms and trying to wear mine or Nick's shoes. She's not coordinated enough to put clothes all the way on, but she can get her arm through the neck of a shirt and a sleeve. I'm forever finding her with clothes dangling from her arms!

I helped her put on one of my undershirts

Then we added a hat and she LOVED it!

I seriously can't get enough of this girl!

I especially love that she's checking herself out in the mirror and making adjustments.

She loves to pull clothes from the dirty laundry and try to put them on. I'm forever picking up clothes that she's strung all over the floor. I've started closing our bedroom door so she can't make a complete mess of our room, but I also love watching her explore dressing-up so I don't stop her from doing it when I'm there to control the mess a little.

Pulled one of dad's shirts out of the dirty clothes basket and put it on her arm.

 And speaking of messes...

How can one little girl make such a BIG mess?!?

 She thinks anything on shelves belong on the floor. For example:

We keep some shoes on a shelf downstairs so I don't have to deal with the mess of shoes that don't get taken upstairs to the closet. Unfortunately, now I get to deal with picking up all the shoes on a daily basis and placing them back on the shelf because Shasta thinks they belong on the floor.

Shasta's shoes go in this basket on top of the shoe shelf.

But this is often how I find her shoe basket.

 One day I was confused because the shoe basket was empty, but there were no Shasta Shoes on the floor. I looked all around wondering what in the world she did with them.

Finally, I found them. She is always making me laugh! She often pulls the books off the bookshelf and stacks them in this chair too.

And the latest mess...

Apparently the toys belong on the floor and she belongs in the toy bin. She emptied the whole basket before climbing into it!

She may cause me a LOT of extra work everyday, but she's worth it! I used to clean throughout the day, but I quickly realized my whole day was spent cleaning. Then I started straightening while she was napping, but that too was pointless because as soon as she woke up she went straight back to tearing the house apart. Now I wait until she's in bed for the night before I pick up all her messes. I've learned to embrace the mess. It's important to me to let her explore and learn from exploring so I try to tell her no as little as possible. As long as she's not ruining things or causing any harm she's free to do whatever her little heart desires.