About two weeks ago, Ayla managed to break the baby gate which restricts her from the kitchen and office. The office thankfully has a door of its own but there are no other doors blocking the rest of the rooms from Ayla. We once had a door where the baby gate is but it just broke down the flow of the house. Now that the gate is broken we have discussed putting the door back up, but may just see if we can repair the gate so that it can be used for another year or so. We figure after that time, we may not need it as much anyway since she has already calmed down so much.

We thought it was going to be a major ordeal with her constantly trying to counter surf or find other trouble but after the first night she has behaved really well. Apparently the counters are just a tad bit too deep and too high for her to reach things unless she really makes an effort. She does have access to a whole lot of paperback books but those rarely interest her. She’s been so good I almost wrote a post about her yesterday and how I was feeling like I could trust her again…but she snapped me out of that.

I went into the garden this morning to set some slug traps & ended up staying out there for almost 2 hours. Since I thought I was only going to be gone about 15 minutes, I didn’t close the front door of the house but I did thankfully close the door to my office.

When I came out, the scene looked like this. Although it’s not that obvious from this photo, almost everything white on the left side of the photo is shredded paperbacks and paper towels. It seems she had a little party in her own honor and neglected to invite me.

Maybe I’m just not supposed to be working so hard unsupervised? I would take her into the garden but first we have to get through the barn which is still a bit of an obstacle course and there is far too much for her to get into. And then the garden itself is a bit of a mess and she just doesn’t really need to be out there. She would have to stay on her leash the whole time so I figure she should enjoy the time in the courtyard. We’d just come back from the morning walk anyway and I could tell she was tired…but I guess just not tired enough.