What’s new this past month? Owlet now has her colours pretty much down, though white, black, and brown are still giving her problems, and she has trouble parsing the difference between shades of the same colour, like purple and lavender. One is definitely purple, but what’s the other one? It’s not pink, but it’s not exactly purple, either, and it frustrates her. Purple and blue are her favourite colours. Playdoh also continues to be awesome, but we need to limit her to playing with it while sitting down, because I am finding tiny crumbs of Playdoh all over the house, often ground into someone’s sock. She correctly points letters out in signs and in text, of her own accord.

We are SO CLOSE to potty training. SO CLOSE. She can tell us when she pees, and she knows when she has to poop, but she freezes up when she’s on the potty. She can hold both for ages, probably longer than she should, but I don’t think she knows how to deliberately release. What we need is a few accidental successes while she’s sitting there, like we had in late spring before summer vacation and relative schedule chaos hit, and it will click, I think.

Her Leapfrog fridge farm is her new favourite toy. (Thanks, Jess!) She likes to hit the music button and spin, or bob up and down, or rock back and forth with a beaming grin on her face. “Clap!” she will order us, and we clap along with the music, or “Dance! Spin!” Eventually she will figure out that Grandma and Papa have one, too, and then the circle will be complete, and there will be no relief from the tinny banjo tunes.

Another wonderful addition to her world is the playhouse! A friend and her children are moving back to the UK, and they passed along a pile of books and games and electronics to us. Among the gifts was a Little Tikes playhouse. We disassembled it and transported it home, scrubbed it well, put it back together, placed it under the trees in the back garden, and let Owlet see it when she woke up from her nap. She was over the moon.

She and Sparky played Tim Hortons drive-through with it for ages (it has four windows, two with shutters) and they thought this was hilarious. We also acquired a Little Tikes picnic table, which they set up nearby to be restaurant seating, and served us leaves.

She is obsessed with the small park near daycare that they’ve visited once or twice. The play structure is designed to look like a castle. The problem is, it’s hard for her educator to bundle up six kids and take them out alone, especially when five of them are in the middle of potty training, so they don’t do it very often. But Owlet practices in the car on the way in every day: “Ask, ‘Park, please, Cahanne? Please, park?'” she says in a very sweet voice, trusting that one day, her educator will indeed say yes.

One of the most exciting things to observe is the development of her imaginative play. For example, her toys can talk to each other, not just to us. (At the moment it manifests in such ways as all her ponies going to the potty in her dollhouse, one by one, and being rewarded with “two chips!” when they’re done. (Chocolate chips, that is, which is what we and daycare use as rewards. The ponies get pretend ones, and they always say thank you. They are very polite ponies.) Phone play is a new thing, too. She’ll hand us a toy phone and we have to talk into it, with her prompting the other part of the conversation. Not actually conversing as the other party, you understand; telling us the subject of the answer, and we have to improvise on that. “Who is it?” we will say into the phone, and she will whisper, “Jacob,” or “Nana,” or “owl” in our other ear.

She uses an adult-sized pillow in bed now, in a rainbow pillowcase. We only have one (it must have been a hand-me-down from a twin bed sheet set), and when it’s in the wash she gets very upset, asking for her rainbow pillow, no, it has to be the rainbow pillow, where is the rainbow pillow? We’re currently planning for the switch to a big girl bed; our daycare director contacted us out of the blue a couple of weeks ago to ask if we needed one, as there was an antique twin bed at her son’s farmhouse that needed a new home. As the frame for the second bunk bed got warped in the move to the house, we accepted gratefully. We could do the crib-to-toddler-bed conversion like we did for Sparky, but it’s cramped for storytime and she is a very restless sleeper to boot, so the more acreage the better, we suspect. We’re thinking of doing the switch around Christmas, or whenever potty training is successful, whichever comes first. Janice recently showed me the completed quilt top she’d pieced for Owlet, which is absolutely spectacular, and once the backing and quilting part are done, it will look beautiful on the new bed.

Her current favourite books are Everyone Hide From Wibbly Pig (a hide and seek flap book, which is an enormous success; we need more Wibbly Pig!), Going on a Bear Hunt, and Murmel Murmel Murmel (“Anybody down there?” she says into cup-like things, then will say “Pop! A baby!”). I scored a miniature four-book boxed set of the Madeline books at the thrift store the other week, so we have just gotten into the first book, which she likes very much.

She has been using an open cup to drink from for the past couple of months. She adores ‘dips,’ where she dunks whatever she’s eating into her glass. Usually it’s a cookie or a bagel (bagels are the bestest food ever), and the contents of the glass are usually milk or chocolate milk as a treat. She loves drawing circles (usually adding dozens of dot eyes with great enthusiasm), and ovals are her newest favourite shape; everything is an oval. She likes playing memory match-up games on the iPad, and giving Angry Birds a try (although she ends up dragging the slingshot in the wrong direction and catapulting the birds away from the target). Her favourite movie is still My Neighbour Totoro, and she’s going to be Mei for Halloween. I wish we could find the little white Totoro that Ceri crocheted for Sparky; it would be a great prop to accompany her costume. We will have to default to the soot sprites, which will work just as well.

Here’s Sparky’s twenty-six-month-old post for comparison.

All right; school and rush jobs for work have settled, I am over my stomach flu, and so I’m finally editing and posting Owlet’s 25-month post, and backdating it. It seems that I didn’t take many pictures this past month, so I am sharing ones taken by Scott and my father, too. (They take better pictures than I do, anyway.)

In general she is perky, strong-willed, and cheerful. She is obsessed with bagels. We have finally hit the toddler whimsical nature when it comes to eating — some nights she will just shove the plate of supper away, even if it is all things she loves. HRH introduced her to Shreddies, which she thinks are just marvellous, and the idea of cereal with milk, which she loves eating off his spoon. (She’s not so fond of it in her own bowl, however.)

She has been at daycare for a month now. She’s attending three days a week, and she loves it. She will frequently repeat the names of all her friends and teachers to herself while she’s at home doing something by herself: “Go June’s. Jacob. Ella. ‘Lista. Baby Ryder. Cahanne. Play.” There are never tears when I drop her off; in fact, I usually have to call her back for a kiss, or even just to take her coat and shoes off because she just walks right in and starts puttering about. Integration went so well in the first couple of weeks that they started potty training the kids the second week, which meant that our cloth diapering has pretty much stopped, other than naps and outings when she’s home.

I’m actually kind of frustrated about toilet training at the moment. She was in a good place in the late spring when we started working on it at home, but then summer happened, with everyone home and the daily routine all topsy-turvy and lots of distraction, so she regressed. And now it’s even worse; while she cheerfully sits at “cool,” she violently refuses to at home, so we’re backing off a bit here.

The toddler stubbornness is becoming more evident in other ways, too. We usually go down the front steps together, with Owlet holding on to the railing with her right hand and my hand with her left. When we left to meet Sparky at school the other day, I locked the door and held out my hand to her, but she waved her hand at me in refusal. “Go away,” she said. “Go car, Mummy.” And she would not budge until I went down the stairs and stood by the car. She went down the stairs on her own.

When she wakes up in the morning, gone are the days of half an hour of quietly talking to herself and her animals. No, now it’s a very imperious “AAAAAAALL DOOOOOOONE” a moment or two after she opens her eyes. Her favourite books are what she calls Princess Bag (the Paper Bag Princess), Toads on Toast, and Mud Puddle. She loves to sing, and her favourite songs right now are “Six Little Ducks,” “Rock-a-bye,” and Raffi’s “Peanut Butter Sandwich” and “Brush Your Teeth.”

She’s starting to make her toys kiss, which is charming. She made HopHop wave goodbye to the cashier and then the packer at the grocery store the other day when they said goodbye to her, with a deadpan expression on her face. She didn’t say anything to them — she usually chirps a “Merci” or “Bye!” as we go — just waved the bunny’s hand at one, then the other, very deliberately.

Her attitude and awareness of her toys has shifted in a very interesting way. She held HopHop out to me the other day and said, “Talk, Mummy.” So I looked at the bunny and said, “Hello, HopHop. How are you?” “Snack,” said HopHop. I glanced at Owlet, but her eyes were on the rabbit, too. “You’re hungry, HopHop?” I said. “Peanut butter crackers,” said HopHop. “Those are a bit too messy,” I said. “What about some goldfish crackers?” “Fish!” said HopHop, very pleased. And then I looked at Owlet and said, “Would you like some too?” “Yes! Fish!” she said. So I got a little bowl of goldfish crackers, and I made sure to give it to HopHop and reminded him to share with Owlet. It was the first instance of Owlet pretending one of her toys was interacting with a real person and playing along with the pretend.

She got some PlayDoh for her birthday from Jeff and Pasley, and she loves squishing it between her hands and cutting out all sorts of shapes.

For the longest time when you asked her what colour something was she’d say “blue” right away. Then she added “purple” to her repertoire of answers. But a couple of weeks ago she held up a yellow crayon and said “yellow” unprompted, and she said something was green the other day. But most of the time things are still blue or purple.

She eats cherry tomatoes by the bowlful outside, standing by the garden and reaching a hand toward them, asking “Daddy? Mummy? Eeeyam? Matos?” She loves having freshly pulled carrots, too, going over to the bucket by the hose to rinse them off and then crunching away on them. She will swing for ages in our little wooden baby swing, saying, “Whee, whee, whee” as she goes back and forth happily. Moving large pieces of gravel from one place to another is still one of the most wonderful games in the world, and dropping them in the water bucket is a thing of joy. We have to keep an eye on her, though, because I found her sitting in that water bucket one day. It was a tight fit, and she couldn’t get out very well. I wonder how long she would have sat there in the water before calling for help if I hadn’t noticed her. (This isn’t the bucket; it’s a snow saucer! The kids pulled it out for water play on another day.)

She’s in size 7 shoes, size 4 pull-ups (they’re just that much looser and easier to get up and down), size 3 to 4 tops and mostly size 3 bottoms. I’ve thrown my hands up at most clothes sizing, actually. The dress she insisted on wearing last weekend was a size 4 and she was swimming in it, but she got a size 4 top for her birthday that barely fits. There is no rhyme nor reason to it all.