A Budding Bonnie & Clyde

     Bonnie and Clyde visited with us over the Thanksgiving holiday.  They connived, they pilfered, they conspired, they betrayed.  Nothing in our house was safe.  Nothing within their reach anyway.  For the miscreants were only two years old.

      We weren’t expecting too much misbehavior out of our grandkids Owen and Gwen.  I figured they would be cavorting with their siblings or playing with the toys we made available to them.  For instance, see the white board and crayons in the picture?  Wendy and I had to do our duties as host and hostess to our guests, which included other children as well as adults.

      When Gwen came into town, we figured out pretty quickly that she had sticky fingers.  She tried to swipe my pill case, found a pen which she used to draw on a page of my daily diary, and grabbed a handful of coins out of my bank which she tossed across the room (she even put a penny into her mouth).

      We started putting things up (way up) that we didn’t want her getting into, and just to make sure they were out of reach, we pulled out a wooden chest that she’d been climbing upon.  That we put it outside in the patio.  That still wasn’t enough.  She could climb the stairs and raid our second story bedrooms where no eyes might be watching.

      So I set up a Muppet-sized large puppet on one of the steps.  Gwen wasn’t fond of this puppet and I knew she wouldn’t try to climb the stairs with it watching down from above.  Gwen and Owen had already had a little race down the stairs but that was with me there supervising close by.  I didn’t want them to have a re-match while I was away.  And Wendy and I had to go to the store.

      When we returned, Gwen and Owen were upstairs.  The puppet had been thrown behind a couch in another room.  What happened?  I was told that Gwen recruited Owen, pointing the puppet out to her cousin.  Owen dutifully retrieved the puppet and chucked him out of sight.  Now if that isn’t a true act of Bonnie and Clyde types, I don’t know what it. 

     Later Gwen’s baby brother Davis started crying in my arms.  Gwen came over to check and I asked her if she could get her baby brother’s pacifier.  Immediately she toddled over to a table, plucked the ‘binky’ from the table, stuck it in her own mouth, and walked past me and her still wailing brother into another room.  My jaw dropped as I saw her walk off, highjacking Davis’s binky.

      Later, she was upstairs again with Clyde, er, Owen.  This time Gwen’s mom went upstairs to check on them.  She caught Owen in the act of putting a travel-sized bottle of moisturizer into an alarm clock cassette deck.  When Owen saw his aunt Kristin, he said, “She did it,” accusing his accomplice.  Gwen is a little younger and doesn’t talk as well as her older cousin so the ruse might have worked if Owen hadn’t been caught in the act.

     But Bonnie and Clyde had to eventually break up when Gwen and family returned to St. Louis after Thanksgiving.  So we can breathe easy again, at least until Christmas.  That’s when they’re due to meet up again.