So I was reading in the Tome of All Parenting Knowledge that Punkin needs to move around and not be limited in her exploration. I swear this book was written by an independently wealthy stay-at-home couple.

As a result, rather than sit at the edge of the living room and steer her back into the Zone of Carpeted Safety, over the past few days, I've been allowing her to crawl freely about the house. It's setting my twitch factor to super high for two reasons: 1) PerpetualPup keeps tracking grass into the house, which means that I am constantly sweeping and swiffering with reckless abandon, to keep Punkin from sticking bits of grass and mushrooms into her mouth (our backyard is FILLED with mushrooms) 2) I still don't have a babygate at the top of the stairs. So I watch her out of the corner of my eye from wherever I am hovering nearby. I won't go into how this is affecting my housekeeping.

The funniest part of the exploration journey she is going on is the noises she makes when she finds something cool. She crawled over to an empty water bottle from the cooler this morning: "Doodeedoo!", then crawled over to the barricade that prevents PerpetualPup from being tempted to chew my antique china cabinet: "Doodeedoo!!". She then backtracked and turned into the kitchen, where she found a case of diet coke: "Doodeedoo!" and then crawled over to the stove and pulled down a handtowel: "Doodeedoo!!!" Then she saw the holy grail of house crawling, the stupid satellite dish tripod that I can neither use nor return because satellite installer guy beat the crap out of it before deciding it was useless to our TV endeavours: "DOOODEEDOOO!!!! thptptptptpt!!!!!" As the tripod is both awkward and potentially painful if it lands on her head, and quite near to the stairs, I quickly repositioned her to crawl back into the living room and pulled out her basket of toys.

She scuttled over to them and promptly dug to the bottom of the basket for the treasured dog-in-a-ball that came with her Fisher-Price firetruck and is now crawling back to the dining room where she can roll the ball "Doodeedoo!"

Smart kid. If I could just figure out a way to ensure she knows that playing with power cords is bad...