K2 is now actively looking for trouble. She is casing the joint. She wanders the house with her stool pressed to her chest, scouting out things--jewelry, watches, medicine, iPods, remotes, pipe cleaner unicorns, modeling clay unicorns, unicorn drawings--that have been deliberately placed out of her reach.
Then she'll plant the stool and get ready to strike. If you look at her at just that moment, you'll see she's looking right at you, too. Thus busted, she'll pick up the stool without a word and move on.
We don't have eyes and shelves and counters and cupboards high enough. We are doomed.
You are doomed. My nephew cut his little sister's hair once. Everyone was horrified that his mom had left the scissors where he could reach them. They were on an open shelf above their kitchen cabinets--the cabinets that are hanging on the wall. So the scissors were about 8 feet off the ground and not readily visible from his viewpoint. Still, he found them.
My son has a heavy wooden step-stool--too heavy to carry around (it was a gift). I kept planning to get one of those lightweight ones but never did. Can't believe I never even thought about the implications of a lightweight stool!
Doom comes in stages. Walking. Learning how to undo zippers. Being able to carry stools. Being able to push a chair. Creating a diversion: draw on leather chairs in marker and then push chair to knife rack. We're all going down.
We never let the stool out of the bathroom. Period. It lives there. We keep the kid out of the bathroom. And if somehow that stool gets out, it goes right back in.
And, NO, this isn't one big poop joke.
Before we had gotten a stool, kid would pull out kitchen drawers (all the way out for bottom drawer and progressively less for each level) to create de facto stairs to get on the kitchen counter. As he's matured, he now just uses the knobs on the drawers as a climbing wall. Needless to say, we've had to move where we keep the candy.
We bought a couple of those inexpensive wood step-stools from IKEA because our kid was a climber and resourceful stacker. He would also open drawers and root around blindly in the cheese graters and pizza slicers. The stools give him access to more stuff (he pushes it to wear he wants it and just today came upstairs to offer me one of my chocolate-covered-cherries that I thought I'd hidden), but at least he's not creating makeshift towers out of laundry baskets and empty boxes anymore. Also, this way, he can help stir things and pour juice, etc. which he loves.