Marco..... POLO!

When you live in a tiny apartment playing hide and seek requires more work than it maybe ought to. Ashley is up for the challenge. She has three, sometimes four, spots she hides in so it's generally not a problem that she plays hide and seek all. the. time. When there's time for it Aiden and I will pretend to search the entire 300 square feet (or something) of apartment looking everywhere she could possibly be except behind the rocking chair.

Because clearly, she'd hide in the cat box before she'd hide behind the rocking chair.


Sometimes she gets so excited she's willing to overlook the part where we make eye contact with her. Other times she forgives our "seeking" being confined to the parts of the house which can be seen from sitting on the couch.


When we play hide and seek at Gramma Miff's house, she's the best. She refuses to hide with Annie because Annie only wants to hide with people who will talk to her while they wait to be found (and she doesn't know why she's always found FIRST!). Ashley takes her hiding seriously.


While I have mentioned that Annie is picking up on snarkiness in the past, today I learned that we need to put in some more work on the "playing along" front.

I was trying to find Ashley so I could dry her hair and get us all out the door. Since there was no pressing reason we needed to leave sooner than later I decided to look for her. She was harder to find than usual due to the giggling that kept coming from under the computer desk.

I roped Annie into looking for her by over exaggerating my request and winking about 100 times as I pleaded "help me find Ash, okay?". This was a lot of winking. She winked back about 10 times and giggled. "okay"

While I checked the cat box, the bathtub, the closet, the oven, and the dryer, Annie marched down the hall, gave a triumphant yelp, and then carried on a conversation with the missing child until I came down the hall.

Winking at her again (I must have looked like I was having some sort of seizure) I asked if she knew where Ashley was. She winked back a bunch, covered her mouth with both hands and nodded. Then she fully extended her left arm and pointed under the desk. "she's right there!"

I asked again, winking all along and now pointing to the wink and shaking my head, "Do you know where Ashley is?"

She again winked back, giggled, shook her head back at me and pointed for all she was worth.

She kind of looked like she was expecting a bounty or a finders' fee.

After 2 or 3 more rounds of asking she finally understood.

"OOOOOHHHH!!! No, I don't know".

I got the camera out to capture Annie's head hunting venture but obviously I had forgotten the inability of Annie's neck to hold her head upright within the vicinity of a camera once it's turned on. (I could offer proof but you'll have to take my word for it).
Note the hiding Ashley who still doesn't know she's been found.