Dear Katie,

You are the most talented, creative, smart, charming, amazing girl I know. You fill my life with sunshine, and I am so proud of the young lady you are becoming. You are my heart, and I love you without bounds.

Now. Stay out of my shit.

Katie shares so many of my personality traits save one - she is a pig. She would be perfectly content to live in semi-squalor, surrounded by gum wrappers and empty toilet paper tubes (made into binoculars or a purse for her doll or a million other things). The biggest problem is she does not contain her chaos to her own space.

She gets in my space.
She gets in my stuff.

The other morning I was greeted by a message on the rolls of extra toilet paper in my closet. "Hi Kelly!!! :)" written in Sharpie. Around the closet she had hung artwork that she had dragged out of the keepsake box (lid left off, other art on the floor). She tried on some of my clothes and shoes and left those lying in the floor, too. She cleaned her ears and shoved the dirty q-tips under my jewelry box. There are THREE trashcans in the bathroom. Four, if you count under the jewelry box.

She likes to take showers in our bathroom. She also likes to soap up the shower door with shampoo and fill up the shampoo bottle with water (like I won't notice that it's water and not shampoo coming out) and cramming little bits of bar soap into every crevice in the shower so I have to spend 20 minutes with a BUTTER KNIFE chiseling it all out.

She poured a bunch of sprinkles and sanding sugar into her toilet before a party, so guests could pee in style. She has drawn and written on every imaginable surface, regardless of appropriateness, all in the name of art.

She went to school smelling like middle management after liberally dosing herself with Sean's man-wash.

Changing her sheets regularly yields such finds as pens and pencils (a couple dozen), dozens of books, flossers (though this should make me happy, I guess), nail clippers, scissors (nothing like sleeping with sharp objects!), notepads, dirty socks, tissues, glue sticks and 18,000 stuffed animals.

Her teacher had a come to Jesus talk with her last week after she found Katie's tooth laying on one of the reading tables.

She cut a hole in a bag of playsand and dumped it all over the garage floor. When Sean told her to clean it up, she hosed it down with water.

She makes sock puppets. Out of my socks. 

We're constantly finding cups full of some disgusting mixture, sometimes hardened and crusty and sometimes just a mass of goo that is so vile it renders the container forever useless. 

She uses my toothbrush. GAK.

There is hope yet. My mom likes to remind me of a bologna sandwich she once found under my bed. And I turned out to be completely neurotic about cleaning!

Maybe sprinkles in the toilet isn't such a big deal, after all.