Choices

Children love the oddest things- our friend's daughter, Lily, crawled for the first time towards a Netflix envelope; another friend's son, Henry, loves his Daddy's smelly socks. For Sophie, it's our TV remote. And I mean LOVE. With an all-consuming "take it away from her and she'll cry" passion. I have cleaned that thing more times than I have cleaned any of her toys just because she grabs for it so often and puts it straight in her mouth. We've given up trying to keep her away from it.

But we've turned this love affair to our advantage and have used the remote to get Sophie to do more crawling- we'd put it in different places in the living room to lure her to crawl around just so she gets enough crawl-time within the otherwise limited confines of our living room. Sometimes, if we're cruel enough, we can get her to crawl in circles for the remote. That's how much she loves that thing.

Which is why I was so completely tickled-- but not totally surprised-- that when faced with the choice of crawling either to the remote or to two of her favorite puff snacks, our daughter proves irrevocably that she is indeed spawned from our gene pool by giving in to the pull of food. There is a moment where you can see just a flicker of indecision, a split second when you think her resolve might be wavering. But nope, she is her parents' daughter- food always comes first, styrofoam-esque wholegrain organic wheat-lactose-additive-free (a.k.a. tasteless) rice puffs or not...