Loose Strife

For a while I kept a running list of “Naomi Naughties” because I couldn’t keep track of why she was being punished for so long. A partial list included

• crushed crayons into carpet with pastry cutter
• spilled nail polish on Lily’s rug
• cut holes in her favorite brown dress
• scratched patterns in the leather chair with a quill
• stole lipstick and wrote on the walls
• poured potting soil in playroom for dolls to enjoy
• wanted to play “Miss Messy”, so she mixed baby powder, bubble bath, antiseptic earring solution and antibiotic cream on her rug and toys and smeared it on her windows

But times seemed to have been better recently. (And to be clear, none of these were efforts to act out or get back at anyone. All were done quietly, independently while she is off in a world of imagination and I’m in a world of dirty dishes or computer code. Most are forgotten until I discover the damage and usually she argues why it was so important to do whatever it was she did. “I like my dress better this way”, “I needed to mix the colors.”)
Currently Naomi’s favorite book is Wild About Books. Naomi can read the whole book herself (except for the cursive part). She took it to preschool to read to her friends earlier this week. “By reading aloud from the good Dr Seuss, She quickly attracted a mink and a moose, A wombat, an oryx, a lemur, a lynx, Eight elephant calves and a family of skinks.” The most popular page shows poems written by different animals and the “stinging review” offered by the scorpion. Not surprisingly, Naomi’s favorite haiku, shown here, is by the stink bug: “Roll a ball of dung — any kind of poo will do — baby beetle bed.” The scorpion declares, “Stinks.”
Adorable. Until Naomi decides to record the verse for posterity by etching it into my antique, inlay, nesting table. Stinks. But somehow still hilarious and cute. I mean if your kid is going to scrawl on your stupid old table, then a poo haiku is a lot better than a random zigzag. But I don’t let on and off she’s sent early to bed; dessert and playdate privileges gone until further notice.
Of course she knows full well not to draw, much less etch, the furniture. But no matter how many repeated lessons, she just can’t suppress her impulses and, shall we say, artistic inclinations? The threat of punishment never seems to affect her decisions. Sometimes I do see her race across the house with a smirk on her face when she’s up to no good, so I know she has a normal sense of right and wrong.
There must be a word for a child like this. Mischievously precocious? Pathologically creative? Help me please.