Gemma loves the bathroom.

Looooooooooves it.

For a few weeks after returning from the lake, anytime she was unobserved, we would hear her trotting to the bathroom, the door shutting, and the scrape of the stool being pushed in front of the door.  For the first week or so it was all to get to the counter and sink but as time wore on, she’d wait, shoulders drawn up and a smile ready just to see how long it would take us to get to her.

We try to keep the door shut.

But with 6 toilet users in and out of the facility all day, it inevitably gets left ajar.  Oh, happy day for Gem!  She loves to ‘wass hans’ and ‘brush!’ and she can scale the toilet in no time flat. Thankfully, it’s been a while since she unrolled an entire roll of toilet paper or filled the bowl with dirty clothes.

Yesterday she discovered the downstairs bathroom and it’s magical blue cleaning disc and an entire sleeve of toilet cleaning wand pads.  I couldn’t stomach handling the mess Max reported to us (and was up to my elbows in supper prep, of course) so Jac handled it.  “There was blue water and bubbles and Clorox smell EVERYWHERE.” It was unclear if she had ingested any but she was obviously ticked – either that her cleaning had been interrupted, that she was stripped or that she was disciplined.  She went from sunshiny, chatty-cat to scowling, grumping rain cloud. It wasn’t pretty and it was very, very blue.

TODAY it was removing the drain cover from the sink and dumping the glass that holds the bobby pins, earrings and hair pretties down the drain.  Kudos to Tess for removing what she could but in the end Jac had to remove the pipe this evening and clean it out.  The fascination over a zip-lock bag marked “Out of Order” and taped over the faucet for the afternoon . . .

Yes, there are locks and latches on the cupboards.  Yes, things are presumed to be out of her reach.  And yet . . . Well, at least we know where this gray hair is coming from.