Accessorize With MIL!

Would you take beauty advice from someone who purposely cuts their hair like this?

Of course you wouldn't! And neither would I. Perhaps MIL is a few dumplings short of a dim sum after all, much as I've suspected for a while. Today, when I came home, I made a discovery. A very odd finding indeed!

See, Raelynn has this one cabinet she loves to open. Even though it has a child-safety lock on it. She KNOWS how to bust that one open. We should have known when she was lurking around her daddy as he put it on there. Once we saw there was no stopping her with that cabinet, we took out anything that could be harmful. But there are still tons of things in there that are annoying to clean up if she gets into it. Try playing 52 pick up with the whole deck scattered about your house in the most random places. And of course, 2 people who lack a full deck are left in charge to watch Raelynn. Which means they just LET her open that cabinet up and take what she wants. Lovely, huh? Fucking morons.

Anyway, I hear the tell-tale sounds of Raelynn opening the creaking cabinet doors and I dash from the kitchen in a flash to stop her. She's pilfered some giant metal bolt-like thing that she can't swallow thankfully but I fear with her newly acquired throwing skills, she'll lob it at something, like one of the mirrors, that can break. I steal it back and go to lock up the cabinet, which also involves me TAPING it shut. But the in-laws just take the tape off. They have no fucking reason to enter those cabinets, mind you. There is no food in there. There is nothing they need to use in there. Yes, they suck. They suck big time.

But today, I saw something new in there. It was a plastic basket that was not in there before. Perplexed, I showed my husband and he too was dumbfounded. Would you like to see the magical mystery basket? Follow me, please...

For starters, let's check out the basket itself. It is absolutely filthy. Jeremy and I would never put something like this in the cabinet without cleaning it up. It looks like someone (MIL? FIL?) dug it from someone's garbage. Dig the stained and dirty pink paper lining the bottom too. It's quite disconcerting than an adult who is aware of how sneaky our child is would put something that has small, chokey items in it within reach of a toddler. You can see under the protractors (one of which has Hello Kitty on it) that there's a small, metal pin or button, a couple keys, bobby pins, gold twisty ties, a calling card (likely expired), and MIL's must-have fashion accessory pick for Raelynn...obviously used, ancient and rusty butterfly hair clips. Next up, a close-up of one of the hair clips...

I tried my damndest in the fading daylight to get a good shot of this. I'm not a professional photographer so shove it. At any rate, you can still see the screw in the clip (much like the screws in MIL's head) is rusted. Ugh.

Here is just another angle with different lighting. I moved it by the window to catch more of the fleeting last bits of the sunlight. The flash was just whiting out most of my other shots at this point.

Jeremy and I stared at the basket with alarm for a few more moments. Then, my husband makes me proud. "Hide it where she'll never find it," he commands me. And just like so many other items before it, the basket from hell tumbled into the vortex of ugly things from MIL never to be seen again.