Oh yes, Aidan is cute.

But sometimes he can knock us around a bit.

For example, recall this:

That’s what Aidan’s room looked like in March of 2005. We had cleaned out the “spare” room, painted over the ugly lime green walls with a very aesthetically pleasing two-tone pattern with a nice “jungle animal” themed border. I think that Debbie Travis would have been impressed. Here’s what it looks like now:

Yup. Yesterday afternoon, Aidan decided to do some remodelling of his own. He’d been picking at the border for a few weeks — or seemed to have been. I never actually saw him doing anything, but we could see where the border was starting to come away from the wall as if someone had been picking at it. It wasn’t Gwen or I, nor the cats, so that only leaves one person. A couple of weeks ago, he actually removed a small section of the border near the corner — I found the remains in his crib the next day. This time, you can see he removed as much of it as he could. I discovered this as I was putting him to bed last night. He must have done it earlier during the day when he was in his crib for what was nominally supposed to be a nap but was more “quiet time”. Hmmm, yeah, no wonder.

So now what? Do we replace the border? I think we have some left over, but I’m not sure if we have enough to replace what’s been removed. And, what’s to stop him from removing the replacement? If we don’t replace it, what do we do? Do we just leave it for now? If we remove the backing (which is still attached to the wall), a somewhat uneven line will be revealed where the two paint tones meet.

We’re … torn….

PS: I took the “after” picture tonight as I was putting him to bed. He thought that having his picture taken as he was going to bed was the neatest thing. He sat up, smiled a huge grin, and repeatedly yelled “Cheese!”. That’s pretty irresistible.