A friend lent me a cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld (wife to Jerry Seinfeld) called "Deceptively Delicious". The point of each recipe is to sneak some sort of veggie of fruit puree into a recipe and get your kids to eat it.

First thing I tried was her "Buttered Noodles" which include yellow squash. Brooke likes yellow squash so I thought it might be an easy sell. Not so much. She ate two pieces and whipped the rest on the floor. I had the sitter try to feed it to her for lunch yesterday and the result was the same.

Next I tried the sweet potato pancake recipe. Brooke loves pancakes. But with these, she actually tried to stick her hand down her throat to try and throw back up the little that she actually did consume.

This morning we had "Green Eggs", which have a spinach puree.

Success! She ate them! Yay!

I'm not sure if one out of three is a very good ratio. I have one or two others I plan to try - including a mac & cheese recipe and one for mozzarella sticks. We will see how that goes...

Today Brooke is 14-months-old and I figured I should give some updates!

HEALTH

She is feeling better, but still has some signs/symptoms. She has a cough, but its not all of the time. She goes through periods where she sounds like she has a rough time breathing. She seems to be feeling pretty good though, running around and causing trouble as usual. I just have to remind her now and then that she isnt 100% and she needs to take it easy ;)

ATTITUDE

All of the developmental emails I get talk about "toddler tantrums". There is a reason for this. Brooke has been slowly developing the art of the tantrum and getting quite good at it. Thrashing, pounding, crying, and hitting herself on the head. Whatever works at the moment. Right now the only solution is distraction, and we are lucky that this specific toddler has an attention span of about 2 seconds. She is quite easily distracted.

LANGUAGE

Brooke has always been very vocal. She sings, yells, squeaks, babbles, and talks. No matter what she likes to be heard ... all of the time. She has developed quite a vocabulary and I figured I should take a second to note her words. There are three categories: words she uses all the time, words she has used but might be a fluke, and words she seems to have forgotton ;)

Common Words
Note: Not all of these words sounds as they are written, but they are instead what she is intending to say!
Dad
Mom
Bye
Down
Quack
Roar (what a lion, tiger, dinosaur and zebra say)
Neigh
Woof
Moo
"Brrrrrrr" (buzzing lips is what an elephant says)
OooohOoooh(monkey says)
Uh-Oh
No
Bath
More
Ball
Duck
Book
Bop (this is what you say when you intentionally hit an object on your head)
Night
Whoa


Possible Flukes:
Back
Elmo
Dog
Door
Golf


Forgotten Words:
Hi
Up
Gobble (what a turkey says)
Baa (what a sheep says)


Words She Made Up:
Na Na = Milk (though she can say plenty of "m" words, she has decided that milk is called "na na". we have no clue why)


FAVORITES
Book: Go, Dog. Go!

Song: Theme song to Go, Diego, Go!

Food: Raspberries

Toy: Gloworm

Word: Its a tie between "bye" and "ball"

Character: Moose A. Moose (from nick jr.)

Occasionally Brooke takes a breather from the terrorizing and
tinkering to be a little bit calmer and relaxed. There are few things
that provide us these peaceful moments, but when we do find her the be
the quieter version of herself it's often because she has her nose
burried in a book.

Here she is, taking a moment to wind down with a good book :)

Took Brooke into the doctor for a few various things and were told she has bronchiolitis. This explains the sleepless nights and nasty sounding cough. We were prescribed an inhaler and also a chamber she needs to use in order to actually get the mist from the inhaler.
Although this gives an idea of what the chamber is like, the little patient in the picture is nothing like our little patient. Ours does not readily put her face into the mask and inhale the mist from the chamber ... quite the opposite, in fact. Its been traumatic for all of us but hopefully it will help her heal and get better soon. And most importantly, we hope she has no recollection of this whole episode. Just in case, we are taking turns administering the inhaler to her so that she hates mommy and daddy equally instead of just one of us being the bad guy ;)

But Mommy still needs her Starbucks. Bundle up Brooke!

Figured it wouldnt take long: iPhone App Claims to Know What Crying Baby Wants. Supposedly this new app can tell the difference between five basic infant cries: hungry, tired, bored, annoyed or stressed.

Brooke is too old for this, but if it honesly works it would haved been helpful for the three months (solid) where she pretty much never stopped crying ;)

And this is seriously the most expensive iPhone app I have ever seen. In fact, it might honestly be the most expensive one of them all. Its $9.99 through the holidays and then goes to its regular price ... 30 BUCKS.

And maybe it does work. But here is another question - does it also understand the language a baby is crying in? Recent research suggests that all cries are not the same and that a newborn baby from Germany has a different cry than one from France. So how do we know that our $30 buys an application that understands our babies cry, along with the accent? Hmmm....