The Can Opener

So now I come back to the tale of the can opener.  Bear in mind this 2 days after we got locked out and I tried to squeeze my children through the cat flap.

Tilly and Zach have just come out of a difficult phase (thank goodness and touch wood all at once!).  During this naughty monkey phase they would pull everything off of Tilly's bed when I was busy doing anything else, like cleaning up or making dinner.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Duvet, pillow, sheets, mattress protector and mattress.  Yep, they even pushed the mattress off the base and onto the floor.  And this would happen a minimum of once a day and at the worst point was happening 5 times a day before I gave up and left it that way after the first time without remaking it again until bed time.  Now add to that Tilly's obsession with taking things out of the kitchen and you get quite a jumbled mess.  She would take the egg beater, the silicon cup cake cases, the cup measures, pretty much anything baking related that she could get her hands on.

So on a particularly bad day, when I wasn't in the best mood with the kids anyway and had spent most of the day nagging them and them not listening, I started to make dinner.  Lasagne in fact.  I got it all started and went to open a can and couldn't find the can opener.  Looked ALL OVER the kitchen and figured Tilly must have taken it.  So I enlisted the kids (although Lani was the only useful one) in looking for it.  We searched all over the place.  We checked her usual hiding spots, like the little corner behind one of the arm chairs and the bottom of Zach's cupboard but just could not find it.  Luckily, I had made most of the sauce before and was just trying to add sweetcorn, so could still carry on with the dinner, it was just incredibly annoying!!

So I didn't find it at all that day or the next morning when I spent a long time completely tidying both the kids' rooms trying to find it.  It wasn't until the following afternoon when I'd given up and was putting away some clean laundry and I found it in one of Leilani's drawers.  We hadn't even thought to check in Lani's stuff.  The sneaky little monkey *knew* we'd check all of her's and Zach's stuff so stashed it away thinking "They'll never suspect Lani, mwah ha ha ha!"

As a side note, a few days ago I found a new hiding place of Tilly's in the bottom cupboard of a bookshelf and in it was stashed my lens cap which she took about 3 weeks ago while I was taking a picture of Zach for his passport photos.  I'd also spent a good long while hunting through her usual spots and in amongst sofa cushions for that one too and had given up.