Clever

I realized a while back that I tend to appreciate clever things. I am a fan of stand up comedy largely because it involves a clever spin on every day events, I like movies with interesting & surprising twists, and I appreciate rap because of the clever word play involved. All in all, I like watching ingenuity in action, since it's amusing as heck.

As I'm discovering, though, little kids are a boundless source of said ingenuity. Sure, there are some really smart kids that pass through the day care, and I readily admit that they impress me with their creativity in accomplishing things they shouldn't be able to do. But even on a more mundane level, little kids consistently get very creative to do things they're not supposed to be doing. Sometimes they just happen to luck in to that course of action, or sometimes they see something that the adults don't see. Either way, these stories are universally worth a good, hearty laugh.

• Watching TV
  The kids don't get to watch TV during meals, since it distracts them too much. However, once they are finished with lunch, they can usually watch thirty minutes of TV or so (it's an inexact science because they don't always finish at the same time). The idea is that watching TV is their reward for finishing their meal, and they don't get their prize until after they've finished.
  
  As you can imagine, there are occasionally times when one of them lags or fusses at the table. So, my mom simply turns their chairs so that their backs are to the television. It's a pretty simple solution, and it's also very easy to spot when a kid is turned halfway around in his respective chair. Cheating this system is usually caught quickly, and the child is admonished to finish his meal.
  
  Once, however, we had a child who was fussing and didn't want to eat her lunch. The usual plan was set in to motion: her chair was turned so that she had her back to the TV. After a few minutes, though, she got surprisingly quiet (note: with kids, you worry when they're quiet). She hadn't finished her meal yet, but she wasn't complaining about watching TV. This was suspiciously unlike her.
  
  She was, however, staring intently straight ahead, in the complete opposite direction of the TV. Noticing this, someone followed her gaze to see that she was staring at the china cabinet in front of her. More specifically, she was staring at the glass windows on the china cabinet. Glass reflects images.
  
  Somehow, she had noticed that from her particular angle, she could watch the reflection of the TV show going on behind her. Sure, it was backwards, but little kid shows don't require high definition. You can watch entire shows without missing a thing even if it's backwards. And that's precisely what she was trying to do: watch TV while seated at the table with her back to said television.
  
  We laughed, shook our heads, and then moved her chair over a bit so she didn't have an advantageous angle. She fussed a whole heck of a lot more at that point, but she also finished her lunch.
  
• Child Proof Locks
  Child proof locks are curious things. They require all sorts of adjustments around the house, but they generally do what they're supposed to do: keep children out of certain containers in the house. I say "generally" because there is always some way that they can be defeated. Little kids have nothing but time on their hands, and they love to experiment. Trust me, no child proof lock is completely fail safe.
  
  I've actually seen one girl figure out how to open up a child proof lock (the kind with a latch) by reaching in her whole hand and yanking down on the latch. This is a far different mechanism for opening the latch than an adult would use; an adult would apply force from the top in order to release the latch. But when your hands are small enough, you aren't tall enough to apply downward force, and you figure out where to apply force, you can yank down on the latch instead. Like I said, it's not fool proof.
  
  Having a kid do something like that is fairly rare, though. In fact, that very same little girl would later forget how to do this. So she could open those locks by herself at two, but she was foiled by them at five. It was kind of funny to watch, knowing the history.
  
  What is more common is a kid trying to circumvent the lock altogether (in hacking terms, this is more akin to a "side channel" attack). For example, most little kids have small enough hands to reach in past the slightly-ajar door or cabinet. They can't really do anything at that point, since they a) can't reach anything or b) can't pull out whatever they can reach (most latches give you like an inch of give). However, if you are clever enough and you're dealing with a cabinet door instead of a drawer, this system can be defeated. Go ahead, try to figure out how. I'll give you a few seconds to see what you come up with.
  
  The answer is that even though you need to grab on to something to move it from its original place, you don't have to have it in your hand to remove it. Grab the item (say, a bottle of cooking spices), pull it out as far as you can with the little wiggle room you have, and then drop it. Literally, let go. Half the time, the item you have in your hand will drop to the floor, outside of the cabinet door. Pick it up from the ground, and carry on with your shenanigans. Luckily for us, these were plastic spice canisters, but I was still impressed that one of them managed to remove something from the child-proofed cabinet door with the lock fully intact and fully operational.
  
• Reaching above you
  Little kids are short. They haven't grown much yet, so you can generally defeat their attempts to grab things by placing them up high. So long as you can reach the item and they can't, you're set.
  
  Some of them, though, are climbers. They will amble their way up any nearby structures in order to try to get to items that they shouldn't be grabbing. Futons and chairs are great examples of this. Heck, any square-shaped toy can even be co-opted for this purpose. Normally, you wouldn't include entertainment centers in that list, because there aren't enough viable footholds and there isn't much space for a kid to stand. So you'd think that putting something on top of an entertainment center would essentially solve the kid-grabbing problem.
  
  However, I've seen a kid mount an effective campaign against height using an entertainment center. What he realized was that he didn't need to actually see the item in order to reach it. This effectively lowered the amount of height for which he had to compensate, since he could still grab items that were within arm's reach even if he couldn't see them. So, that's exactly what he did. He climbed up the first rung/step of the entertainment center, and then he turned around. Rather than try to face the candy he was trying to reach, he effectively turned his back to it. However, that gave him enough stability to lean backwards in to the TV and assorted electronics, while still reaching his hand above him over the top of the entertainment center. Then it was just a matter of time as he fished around to grab the item that he knew would be there somewhere.
  
  Unfortunately for him, this plan required more time than he had, since an adult quickly spotted him mid-operation and pulled him down from the entertainment center. Nevertheless, it was a really good plan. He would've succeeded had it not been for us pesky adults.

All in all, I've come to the decision that little kids are criminal masterminds. Never put it past one of them to circumvent a barrier put in front of them, because I can almost guarantee that at some point, one of them will do it. Incidentally, this also means that keeping an eye on them is almost certainly guaranteed to make you laugh at some point.