Brooke's Printer

Brooke has a special relationship with our printer. It's just an ordinary printer - pretty much a box with some buttons and trays. Brooke loves it. She likes to stand on a chair that I have next to it and try to take it apart. She loves to pull out the 4x6 photo paper and put it back in or strew it about as her fancy has it.

Her most favorite thing to do however, and I what I think she considers is her job, is to pull out pages as they are being freshly printed out. She is mysterious. I will print something and she will appear out of nowhere and stand while my document is printing, patiently waiting for her prize - to rip it out and hand it to me.

She has keen hearing. I know she is upstairs while I am downstairs planning on printing a document. I know she is there, but sure enough, the whir of the printer guarantees that she will materialize without a sound. She is as quiet as a cat. Standing with grim patience she grabs printout after printout handing them to me efficiently without taking her eyes off my hewlett-packard.

She hands the printouts to me without eye contact. While I watch in irritation - I really don't want her to wrinkle my papers, but arguing with a one y/o is pointless - I am at the same time impressed and tickled. She has a method. She listens and knows that more than one page will come out. She gets the page with her right hand and hands it to me with the fierceness of a bullseye slingshot. Page after page. Wait, shoot, wait, shoot. When the printer sounds like it's finished, she disappears back to where she had come from. Job done.