Little Caroline has grown out of the stage where she is just an adorable bunch of sweetness and has become an individual in her own right.
Past two now, she is at that distracting, exasperating, ludicrous, amazing and precious interval when youngsters try everything once and most things twice or more. Here is an extract from Ruth's latest letter:
"Had quite some excitement one day while Phil was in Detroit when I went out to the garbage pail and CL quietly turned the night-latch and locked me out of the house. Front door also was still locked because I hadn't been out there yet that morning. Garage and car also locked, all storm windows carefully hooked from inside and windows locked, and the neighbors away for the week-end! And me, on a nice cold day, with only a light jacket for wraps, no gloves, et cetera.
"Tried for some half hour to get CL to turn one of the night latches enough to open it and she did fiddle around but didn't get either of them completely turned. I finally remembered one kitchen window was unlatched, because we have a thermometer business that keeps that storm window from quite closing. It was one of the little high ones over the sink, and I had nothing to climb on but a couple of garbage pails piled on each other. Finally managed to get up where I could see in, but not enough to climb in.
"With another 15 minutes or so of painstaking instructions on my part and painfully slow compliance on Caroline's, I managed to induce her to get a chair, climb up on a kitchen counter, open a cupboard door, get my household key ring from the hook and hand it to me through the window!
"She took a sudden and unusual notion to be extremely obedient--to earlier instructions--and kept rebelling, informing me virtuously that she wasn't supposed to climb on the kitchen table, that it would be a bad girl to get into the cupboard and take the keys down, and it was quite a task to convince her that this was an emergency and it would be quite all right, for once! If only her conscience would pick more appropriate times to bother her!
"I must stop now and give her a little lift with the housework. She is dusting industriously and trying to set things to rights. She loves the new vacuum which she calls the 'bapoon cleaner,' so much that I hardly can get my hands on it." --Hope