Friday, March 12, 2010

A tale of two trash cans

Our kitchen trash can is open at the top, which means that Annabella can throw whatever she likes into it. After completely losing her Aqua-Doodle pen, finding one of her balls in there, and digging through it looking for another, I decided it was high time to get a new trash can.

For those of you who don't know my husband well, he's kind of resistant to change. Especially small little changes involving things like trash cans. And he liked our trash can. But even Jason could see that a new trash can was in order.

So I'm at Target with Annabella, and I'm in the trash can aisle. And there are a bunch of different options. But the most expensive option is almost identical to our current trash can, except with a lid and a step that opens that lid. But it's the most expensive one. And I could get another one that would do the job for 50% less. And my husband is also super frugal. So I stand there and weigh the merits of both, and finally decide that I should go with the near-identical more expensive one.

I bring it home, and Jason's not 100% thrilled with it (the lid mechanism causes it to stick out a little farther from the wall), but all in all he's pretty happy. So we set it up, and life is good. Until Annabella grabs a tissue from the box, wipes her nose, and toddles over to the trashcan. And of course she can no longer throw her tissue away. So we say, hey, we'll just keep both trash cans in the kitchen. It's not ideal, but we can just throw out stuff that isn't gross in the open one, and use the closed one for everything that's nasty. And it looks a little ridiculous, and nobody ever quite remembers to throw stuff in the right trash can, but it's basically worked for us for about a week.

And then last night Jason spied our little toddler lifting the lid of the new trash can to throw something out. She's just too smart for her (and our) own good!

Really, we should have known better. If she's smart enough to grab a tissue from the box, wipe her nose, and throw it out, we should have realized that she'd figure out how to get the lid of the new trash can open. But still!

I'm guessing this won't be the last time she outsmarts us.

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