I believe it’s important to expose my daughter to lots of different adult activities at this early age. And for that reason, I made her fill out a bracket and we’re going to go root for Bucknell at Buffalo Wild Wings. Below is her bracket. For those who are especially interested, I’ll add the videos that show how she came to these decisions later. And sure, it looks like she’s just picking random blocks and putting them in her mouth. Or maybe she’s trying to find a way to communicate with me to make sure I get her bracket right. Anyway, play along with her below and find out if you’re better at picking games than a 9-month old. 🙂

Baby’s First Bracket

The following is a 6-minute video explaining how I was going about having Mabel picking her bracket, during which Mabel did not cooperate. But she’s super cute.

Step One: Pick the Final Four
The following are three videos showing Mabel picking her Final Four using blocks numbered 1-0 (Daddy wouldn’t let her pick anything over 10 in her first year. Also, I put the lower numbered blocks closer to her to create a sort of advantage for the lower seeds. Except in the West region, where I just threw them willy-nilly on the ground).

Step Two: Pick the number of 11-14 seeds to make the Sweet 16, limit of 10 (Daddy wouldn’t let her pick any 15 or 16 seed upsets in her first year, even though it happened twice last year, as she pointed out to me last night).

Step Three: Pick the Sweet 16 upsets. She did this by first picking the ranks of the two upsets, then by picking the regions they were from.

Step Four: Pick the National Champion and runner-up. We did this by using the letters from her wooden alphabet toy.

Step Five: Pick Villanova over North Carolina. Daddy made a bet with another father about the location of a playdate. So we had to pick Nova. No video necessary.

Step Six: Pick one more first round (I mean second round) upset per region. Daddy let Mabel pick one more first-round (I mean second-round) upset per region (Again, daddy wouldn’t let her pick a 15 or 16 until at least her second year. Also, the East region upset was not videotaped because we ran out of battery. It was Bucknell. Oh well.).

Step Seven: Fill in the rest of the bracket according to seed. I don’t think we have the stamina to do this 63 times.

And there you have it. It was that easy. Actually, it was pretty difficult at times. Here are some unproductive, albeit cute outtakes.