Brooke is a serious no-fear-adventurer. Jeff likes to call her "Dora The Explorer" (a character in a children's cartoon, in case you are not familiar!). She spends her awake time doing anything and everything she can to get into trouble. When we place her into a room, she sits and scans around for what she can get into ... then charges towards the first object of interest. Her attention span is quite short, and she often doesnt make it to her original goal! She stops at many things along the way, making it difficult to guess where she will end up (and impossible to try to prevent her from getting into something because we are not too sure what her agenda is).Right now she loves crawling behind things (like the couch and coffee table), playing with electrical cords, climbing over things, throwing stuff, hitting toys onto the floor (or each other) to see how they sound and heating/cooling vents.
She is a very smart girl, too smart for us most of the time. She has learned that she has a "food ranking" in which she always likes one item more than the other. For example, she likes tortellini more than peaches (which I learned last night). If you give her two items at the same time, she will only eat the one she likes more ... even if she likes them both. She will reject the one that is lower on her ranking scale, and then demand (or cry) more of the one that ranks higher. We need to feed her one item at a time, in order of what we think might be her ranking. Least favorite first ... up to most favorite. It can become very tricky and exhausting, trying to guess where her mind and preferences are. If we serve something in the wrong order then the game is over.
I assumed she would like peaches more than the tortellini (since peaches are one of her most favorites), so I saved those for the last item of her dinner. After she finished the tortellini I gave her the peaches ... and she just stared at them. It was a no go. Now I know ... peaches come before tortellini ;)
