Re: GM at a restaurant, another odd toddler encounter

Once again, toddler logic eludes my understanding. ...Terra endlessly opened and closed the bathroom door, the little girl being amused by this repetitive action for who knows what reason.

Little Terra just hasn't seen enough bathroom doors yet! She just can't get enough of it! That's the fun with toddlers: they put the fascination back into hinges, handles, strangely inexplicable draughts of air that can be created by simple acts of motion (and maybe it was stuffy in there - she'd invented a fan!!!)

said "hi" to her. Terra simply shook her head

Now that is a tough one;) Maybe it meant: "Don't attempt to engage me in discussion at this point, I'm thinking - about that door..."

tell me that it's a rewarding experience to be around a toddler. But I just don't understand their behavior or why they do the things that they do.

Maybe that's kind of partly why it's rewarding - they give you stuff to puzzle over...

In one of the classes I sometimes teach, one of the kid's parents has a little toddler I've got to be on friendly terms with, who accompanies her mum and older brother on the school run each morning. Whenever I've taught in that class, she regularly comes into the classroom, usually just as I'm setting up for the day, and she wants to explore!!! It's usually a pot of crayons that grab her immediate attention - but it's not so much trying to colour with them as the fascination of tipping them out of the pot... sometimes she even likes putting them back:) But this is, after all, a genuinely interesting activity: the clunk of wood on wood; the empowerment of creating a tiny piece of chaos out of order; observance of gravity in action; seeing a swarm of falling colours; repetition of an action until one day it becomes filed away as something ordinary and discovery can move on...