DESTROYER TROLL

I never understood playpens before. Why would you want to put your child in a small cage while you do the housework or cook? Surely that is just laziness? After all, how much harm can one small, angelic troll cause?
Then I had Amaia...
Amaia has developed her own special method of crawling. It means she can lose things all round the house for you. She particularly likes moving one of each of her siblings' shoes to another room so they run about in a panic before school in the morning. After she discovered shoe moving, she progressed to book-shredding. Despite having all these kids and all these books, Amaia is actually the first of my children to realize you can take the books down from the shelves and rip off their front covers just to confuse the adults. She seemingly has a stash of (fortunately washable) felt tips somewhere that she uses to colour in the wooden floor boards whenever we turn our backs too. If one of the little ones drops a knife on the floor at dinner, Amaia instantly finds it and creeps about brandishing it menacingly. She does a mean impersonation of the Andrex puppy too these days. In the bathroom she alternates between puppy antics and loo-brush sucking. She has a great fondness for bin-emptying and of course eating the no-longer edible contents of bins wherever possible. But I think the thing I am finding most tedious at the present time is the fact that not only has she worked out how to take the lock off the Welsh dresser door where we keep the plates, but she takes them out quietly one by one, puts them all over the dining room floor and today has moved on to colouring in the insides of the bowls once again using her well-hidden felt-tips. The most astounding thing I find is that almost every time we find her in a compromising position, both Léon and Anna are in the room with her and it never occurs to them to tell her off. What's your sister doing guys? Ohhh, emmm colouring in the floor I think!
Maybe a playpen wouldn't be such a bad idea...