Stripping down

Dahlia has been hard at work on a big project: Learning how to undress herself. As you may recall, it all started with the girls figuring out how to pull down their pants and remove their diapers. After that rather alarming development, I began to dress the kids only in one-piece outfits, hoping that the snaps would provide protection against further diaper-removal episodes.

This tactic has been a success in that it has banished bare tushies from the playroom (for the time being, anyway—read on). It has not, however, kept Dahlia from continuing to experiment with clothing removal. Her next challenge was to learn how to unzip and shed her sleepsack. Mission accomplished—this is how I found her after a nap a few weeks ago:

To prevent her from taking off her sleepsack again (and possibly causing further naptime mischief, such as learning how to unsnap her onesie to remove her diaper, or figuring out how to climb out of her crib by gripping the rails with her toes), we started putting the sleepsack on her backwards. Problem solved.

But for how long? Even with the zipper in the back, she can still unzip it up to her knees. And her zipper-mania is no longer limited to just her sleepsack. Last week I found her in the playroom like this, almost completely out of her zip-up jammies: 

Of course, none of this unzipping business matters, as long as she doesn't know how to unsnap her onesie, right? After all, it's the taking off of the diaper that I am really worried about. Well, here's the newsflash: As of a couple of days ago, Dahlia has figured out how to work snaps, too. And she is very happy about it:

What am I going to do with this girl? She will not be contained, but I can't afford for her to have access to her diaper (I shudder even thinking about the possibilities that this could entail!). And I know that if Dahlia is becoming adept at taking off her clothes, the other three are probably not far behind. Could duct-taped diapers really be in my future?

Bumming around

A few months ago, Jude figured out how to remove his pants. Since then, we find him in a state of semi-undress just about every day:

Surprisingly, during all this time, the other kids had failed to pick up this pesky habit—until yesterday. Watching Jude slip out of his pants for the millionth time, the girls finally decided to follow suit. And then Dahlia took the pants-free look a step further: In a daring move, she shed her diaper as well:


Since it was bedtime, we slapped the (thankfully dry) diaper back onto her bare bum, immediately zipped her into her sleepsack, and hoped the incident had been a fluke.

It wasn't. Today Lucy decided to try the same trick, this time with a very wet diaper:


I really don't want to see what happens when one (or more) of the kids takes off a dirty diaper, but neither am I quite ready to resort to duct-taping them into their diapers. Looks like the Fab Four will be wearing one-piece outfits from now on—and I'll just have to hope that they don't learn how to unsnap them anytime soon!