A "Willful" Baby

The antibiotics are already kicking in and Sadie seems to be feeling much better (although she has three more days of medicine just to make sure she's kicked the ear infections).  We drove in to Redding today with Daddy (who was on his way to school in San Francisco) and then visited Hoho with Nani and Grumpa.  It was quite a busy day.  

While we were at Target, waiting for Nani and Grumpa to drive in to town, Paul realized that Sadie didn't have a pop-up toy.  I'm not entirely sure what they are actually called (so I've posted a little picture).  It was one of my favorite toys growing up and Paul was also adamant that it's one of those toys that every kid should have.  So it went into the basket (actually it went into my arms because we didn't have a basket because we weren't supposed to be shopping.  We were "just looking around").  

Once we got home from out trip to Redding I untangled the toy from the box and set it up on the floor.  The cute little animals peered at Sadie and she peered back.
And then she set to work.  What were the toys doing out of their boxes?  She hadn't taken them out of the boxes.  Mommy had.  I had visions of the incident a few months ago with the little book on her exersaucer repeating itself, when Sadie decided that no one else should be allowed to touch her toys.  If I tried to open the book to encourage her to look at the pictures she would slam it shut with an annoyed look.
It wasn't easy for Sadie to slam the animals back into their boxes.  Some of them resisted (okay, it was really just her fingers getting caught when she tried to shut the lid).  For the record, it currently takes Sadie about five minutes to corral all the animals back into their boxes.  

Once they are in the box we have another problem.  She only knows how to work the blue switch and she can't quite get the blue switch to work consistently.  That means that once the animals are in their boxes they are stuck in there boxes.  Despite this obstacle to playing with the toy she still didn't want help.  Sadie is a little... willful... and when she has decided that she is going to do something her way, she refuses all help.  She hit the toy.  She shook it upside down.  She wrestled it to the floor.  She crawled around (and she is really starting to get the idea of crawling) and hauled it around the room with her.  She even put it in front of her when she was playing with the Cruise and Crawl.  

Every once in a while I would sneak over when she wasn't paying attention and press the buttons and all the animals would pop out.  And she would immediately close all the little flaps again.  While she still hasn't gotten the buttons down to work the toy, she's really getting good at closing the lids!