Organizing People and things

Lately, TerraDactyl has been staging weird little scenes.  It's pretty funny.  Often it's at a meal.  She'll arrange her trains so they can eat from one side of her plate while she eats from the other.  But sometimes it's just at a random time, like above.  It wasn't actually time to eat, but she still staged a meal for her dinosaur and elephant friends.  

Other times, she just makes some bizarre scenes.  Like this one.  It's weird.  It makes me think of a rebellion leader standing on a soapbox, rallying the workers to strike or something.  My interpretation probably says more about me than TerraDactyl.  It could just as easily be a teacher, or lecturer, or even a preacher.  

Sometimes TerraDactyl will spend half an hour just arranging and re-arranging things.  She LOVES stacking and unstacking these silicone muffin cups.  I bought them to serve her snack food, but if I leave them out on the drying rack, she'll drag her stool over to steal them and play with them.  

The other day I was mixing up a newly opened jar of peanut butter.  We get the natural kind, so the oil separates out.  I usually use a knife, but I decided to use a trick DH discovered.  He just puts one beater into my hand mixer and just beats the peanut butter.  He hates mixing it up, but he said using the mixer was super easy.  Well...  I had too much going on and got distracted (of course).  I was trying to get TerraDactyl to eat lunch, and I was cooking, and opening up the new jar of peanut butter... anyways, I accidentally started the hand mixer before I had a hold on the peanut butter jar.  The entire jar spun around and splattered peanut butter EVERYWHERE.  On the counter and floor, sure.  But all over my clothes, the spice rack, the toaster, the butter dish - which was open.  I stood there silent and in shock for a few seconds and then TerraDactyl starts crying!  I think the mess upset her.  I managed to convince her to stay out of the kitchen at least until I'd cleaned up the floor.  But then she ran in to point out the peanut butter on the front of the cupboards that I hadn't gotten to yet.  So I let her clean that part while I worked up on top of the counters.  I looked like I'd lost half the jar, but it really wasn't that much volume-wise.  It was just very well spread out.  

While you might think that spraying peanut butter over the entire kitchen would be the funniest part of the story, I think this next part is even better.  A couple days later I was making cookies while TerraDactyl played in the kitchen with her toys and books.  When I got to the point where I needed to mix up the wet ingredients, I pulled out the hand mixer and snapped the beaters in.  TerraDactyl got a wide-eyed look on her face and ran into the kitchen and gathered up all her toys and books and moved them out into the dinning room.  She sort of hid behind DH and peeked out to keep an eye on me.  I think she was worried I'd cover everything in peanut butter again.  It was pretty funny.  I'll have to keep this response in mind when we have trouble getting her to clean up her toys in the evening.  Maybe I can chase her around the house with my hand mixer.  :)