Has Anyone Seen My (fill in the blank)...?

My daughter is a trash monger. She delights in dragging food wrappers and coffee grinds from the depths of the can. I have noticed that certain items belonging to her that I had recently seen in her possession are finding their way into the trash. Yesterday I had to remove her socks from amongst the cucumber peels no less than two times. I fear that I may lose items important to me, such as bills and books, to the city dump.

When she became tired of hearing “no touch,” she would take a break from that bit of mischief to toss handfuls of cat food around the kitchen floor so that her brother could frolic through the piles, like so many rain puddles, and spatter it to even father reaches of the kitchen, i.e. under the stove and refrigerator where it will rot for months until Mommy feels the urge to pull the appliances out from the wall in order to vacuum underneath them.

This morning she uncovered a hidden ant trap. To her credit, she picked it up and toddled across the room with it and handed it over to me instead of procuring tools and attempting to open it up to see what was inside. I was also very thankful the other day that she had enough sense to throw one of her own books into the toilet instead of a book that belongs to the library. Mothers must be grateful for these sorts of things.