Charlie may be our first child who has a tendency towards cleanliness.

I put a very heavy emphasis on "may" because as soon as I wrote on here about how great of an eater he was, he quit eating 3/4 of the food he previously seemed to love. He has discovered his favorites (mostly kiefer, raisins, Mexican food, meat and chocolate to name a few) and it apparently dawned on him that he doesn't have to eat everything we stick in his mouth.

Anyway, he does seem to enjoy putting things in their rightful place, which is a completely new phenomenon in our house. He will find Sam's clothes on the floor, carry them up the steps and put them in a laundry basket. He puts scattered shoes into the shoe basket - not a lot, but once in awhile. If he spills a bowl of food, he picks up the pieces and puts them back into the bowl. And when he finishes a drink, he won't set the cup wherever he happens to be; he walks over to the kitchen and tries to put in on the counter. He grabs a cloth and wipes up spills and wipes his face when he's done eating. One day, he climbed up a chair and got a knife we had put in the center of the table thinking he wouldn't reach it. When I saw him come into the kitchen with it, I headed towards him to take it, but before I got there he had opened the silverware drawer and put it away. And the last time he pulled out all the pots and pans to bang on them, he actually put them all back into the cupboard when he was done.
Here he is helping Sam put away the dishes. (And yes, that is Christmas music in the background. Elena seemed to think July was a good time to pull out the Christmas CDs)

On the flip side, he is still equally good at making messes. You may have noticed as soon as the dishes were put away, he started to pull them back out. This evening he drug the garbage can into the living room without our noticing (we had it out to throw out all our cucumber peelings and hadn't put it away yet) and dumped the contents onto the carpet. The other day I left the breakfast table to grab something and came back to see he had dumped a box of cereal all over the newspaper and was topping it off with my coffee (don't worry, it was lukewarm, which seems to be the only way I drink my coffee since having kids). Of course, he did follow it up by running over to the laundry, finding a cloth and attempting to wipe it all up. Here he is all proud of himself after using the stool to reach the cinnamon and dump it all over  the kitchen.