2007: Smart like a dog

Well, it finally may have happened... Scarlett may now be as smart as Toby dog. This is no, small feat, mind you. Toby knows over 280 commands, has 3 different modes of walking off leash, and knows both hand and vocal commands.

But we figure Scarlett probably knows almost as many concepts, and has begun one-trial learning; that is she can observe something and then being able to mimic and incorporate and generalize those actions.

Just today, she saw me open and close the baby gate, and promptly walked over to the baby gate, and lifted the handle (which I haven't been using the child saftey switch yet) and opened it. She then walked down the hall to another baby gate and lifted the gray handle, generalizing what she had learned right away. That is actually a very sophisticated cognitive step, superior to anything Toby knows. Time to use the baby safeties. (On an aside, we've also decided she is also part monkey, as when she couldn't open the gate, she has started to climb the gate, holding the top of the gate and putting her feet on the gate off the ground.)

She is also really grasping language and its usage. Today, we could tell she was acting hungry, and asked if she wanted a bottle, and she said "bah", walked across the room, and pointed to the bottle and again said "bah". We picked her up and she drank from the bottle, which she doesn't do if she isn't hungry. There is so much going on there cognitively--- she is associating a word (bah), with an object (bottle), that will satisfy a feeling (hunger), and then an additional second step action to walk towards the bottle to retrieve it... while it seems simple, it is actually very complicated set of cognitive actions.

She's done other amazing things like we asked her to go get her Neh-Neh, and she walked across the room, grabbed her horse and brought it to us, demonstrating she knows lots of things she doesn't even say yet. Mow-mow is her newest word for cat.

Oh, yeah, she's still blonde, still blue-eyed, and still tiny. Even though she looks big in most of the closeup photos, at 12.5 months she's still not quite 18 pounds yet. A 1-yearboy at her gym class today weighed over 30 pounds. Here's a photo of Arley to scale at the beach--- which she loved by the way.... she also kept walking over to the surfer boys--- a bad habit we'll have to nip in the bud.