the morning routine

i'm pretty sure i come from a different planet than brooke does. she comes from the land where feelings have colors and numbers have food.

on planet brooke, red is mad, blue is sad & yellow is happy. those are pretty normal, but there are also combinations of them, and she doesn't feel like explaining what she means because in her mind, no one understands her anyway, so why bother. like sometimes she'll just yell "PURPLE!" there's nothing else, just that loud purple and a ticked off face. i've learned that means she's combining the mad red & sad blue and getting purple. sometimes she'll say, "dark purple," which is even worse than a standard purple because there's some black mixed in & no white in sight.

she also associates numbers with food sometimes. i can't remember them all, but the one she keeps saying lately is "mustard" whenever the answer to a math question is 14. we don't even eat mustard, i'm not sure she's ever tasted it, but for some reason, mustard & 14 are synonymous.

and she's got these little routines that must be followed in order for her day to go right. like when she first wakes up, she goes into the bathroom, whips back the shower curtain & yells "RAAR!" she's always alone in there, but just in case there was a monster, she wants to get a jump on it before it has a chance to get her. she does the same thing when she walks into the kitchen when it's still dark. flips light, bellows out an angry raar.

one day we forgot to fill her little zip bags of cereal before going to bed the night before, so when she came down first thing & went to the fridge to find them, they were no where to be found. the cereal boxes were within her reach & she knows how to pour it into her own little bag, which she did, but then she couldn't just eat it. as she told us later, she filled the bag, put it into the fridge, turned the lights off, went back upstairs & "restarted her day." apparently it's more important for the cereal to be in the fridge when she first comes down than it is to just get the food into her hungry belly. i'm just glad we've gotten to the point where she took care of it herself rather than screaming & howling until we woke up & filled it for her.

she's been mentioning her "morning routine" to us for a while lately & since she generally gets up before us, we didn't really know what the details of the routine were. she was irritated at our ignorance, so she wrote it out for us and included her night routine too. you know, to help us come out of the darkness & into her light. here is the picture of the list.

she might drive me bonkers some days & leave me feeling purple, but most of the time, brooke makes me very yellow.