Kami and Krissi

Kids are so much fun, especially when they are your own. As the big kids matured and grew out of getting in trouble, Kami and Krissi grew into it.

One day Kami got into Holly's lipstick and painted her face red. She was so cute! She also found a pair of my pantyhose and figured out how to put them on. I discovered her up in my bathroom, trying to stand in my high-heeled shoes, wearing a diaper and the panty-hose pulled all the way up over her body and the back of her head, her face covered with red. I should have scolded her, but she looked so funny I had to get out the camera and make her pose for pictures instead.

Not long after that she found a pair of scissors and cut off most of her hair. It was a mess! We took her to a beauty shop and they gave her a short, pixie hair cut which was actually adorable, but there wasn't much they could do with the ¼ inch fringe she'd left on top for her bangs.

I thought she'd learned her lesson, but it wasn't long afterwords that she found another pair of scissors and cut some more of her hair. This time I hid all the scissors in the house, and tried to reason with her.

“You mustn't cut your hair anymore,” I told her severely. “I'll have to spank your bottom the next time you do that.”

I thought she understood, but I was wrong. Two or three months later she tried the same stunt all over again. I was exasperated. Just what part of “don't cut your hair” didn't she understand?

“Kami, why did you do this?” I asked when I found her in her bedroom, hair on the floor, scissors in her hand, and a look of “Oh, no, I've been caught” on her face.

“To look pretty,” she told me timidly, waiting to see if I was actually going to spank her or not.

“But when you cut your hair it doesn't look pretty,” I told her crossly, wondering how on earth I was going to be able to get her to understand.

“Holly and Alyssa do,” she told me in an “I don't know what you're so upset about” kind of voice. “I want pretty hair.”

That's when it finally dawned on me that Kami associated getting your hair cut with making it look pretty, and I realized she just wanted to look good. I kept the scissors hidden for years after that.

One evening, about a month before Krissi turned one, she burnt her hands on our kitchen oven. I had been baking something, and went upstairs for a second. The rest of the kids were all in the kitchen. Kami looked inside the oven and left the door open. Krissi was just learning to toddle, so she put both hands on the oven door to support herself. Poor little thing!

I ran downstairs as fast as I could when I heard the rest of the kids start shouting and Krissi begin to cry. Immediately I put both of her hands in cold water, but it was obvious they were badly burned. We rushed her to the Urgent Care Clinic, but by the time we got there she had huge blisters bubbling up all over her palms. They wrapped her hands in bandages up to her elbows, which she had to leave on for weeks. Thank goodness the burns didn't seem to be too painful.

Krissi looked so sweet, her little arms and hands stiff with bandages, trying to hold her bottle or suck her finger. She never did like to suck her thumb, but her pointy finger was always stuck in her mouth, usually upside down, while she would hold a fluffy in her other hand, rubbing it against her cheek. She loved anything soft, especially cotton balls or pieces of soft stuffing she'd pull out of torn quilts or stuffed animals, or yarn or lint, or whatever she could find that was soft.

She and Kami seemed to be exact opposites, but they were both little dolls.