Category Archives: Diary

Owlet: Fifteen Months Old!

I am astonished at how quickly Owlet is changing. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be, seeing how she’s practically a different baby every day, and we’ve gone through this with Sparky… but wow. Suddenly we have a little girl.

We have an accident-prone little girl, to be honest. Owlet tripped over a mote of dust and drove the corner of a baseboard into the centre of her forehead last Friday night. Blood literally pouring down a child’s face onto a white shirt does interesting things to one’s focus. She’s mostly fine now. It’s her second head trauma this week. (The first one wasn’t this bad; she whacked the edge of her eye socket on the edge of the coffee table, bending down to pick up a cup. It split and bled, but wasn’t half as bad as this one.) HRH said she’s not allowed to walk ever again. If she’d been a bit worse we’d have taken her to emergency, but she seems fine apart from the gash. It possibly could have used 1-2 stitches, but waiting forever at the hospital and putting her through that would have been much more stressful for everyone. Owlet was her usual perky self half an hour after it happened, so things seem okay. I had forgotten how badly head wounds bleed. And Owlet hates cold things put against her face; she gets very angry. At least the cold washcloths and frozen packs distract her from the actual trauma. And we discovered that she has a latex sensitivity, so now she has the slightly curved gash in the middle of her forehead plus a raised red irritated circle around it from the band-aid we covered it with. HRH says it looks like a Do Not Enter sign. Let’s hope the baseboards pay attention next time.

In the less-than-dramatic column of achievements, Owlet adores brushing her teeth, climbing stars (and can do it very well now, so well that Sparky will let her climb them alone with him, much to our heart attack-inducing surprise when we discovered that), and helping unload the laundry basket and put her clean diapers away. She can throw together her stacking rings like a pro. While crayons are still too tempting to chew, she has discovered plain pencils, and loves to draw with one on the promotional pads of paper we get every couple of months in the mailbox from our local real estate office. Watching me draw cats and fish and houses fascinates her.

We tried a series of new sippy cups, because she was hauling away on the valve ones we’d been using since she was about eight months old and working so hard that I was envisioning disaster when we started giving her open cups. Three different kinds later, it turns out the cheap take n’ toss style are the winners. Although the straw cups aren’t a total loss; she just needs to remember not to tip them up like the other cups. They’re good for the car.

I am very impressed at how well she follows direction. “Switch the toy to your other hand and put this hand through your coat sleeve” was followed without hesitation the first time I said it. “Time to get your boots and coat on so we can go get Sparky” is followed by her bringing her boots to the door and plunking herself down in my lap, pointing up at her coat, and saying “Go, go, go” while trying to turn the doorknob afterward. It’s fascinating to watch her figure things out, too. She can drag things around and climb on them to reach higher. (This one is somewhat disconcerting.) She tried to squeeze through the cat door in the gate that blocks off the stairs to the attic office the other week, too, but got stuck with one arm, her head, and part of her torso through it.

She has started waving hello to people. She wanders around the schoolyard under the trees where we wait to meet Sparky, and waves cheerily at the other parents. She ran right up to a pair of twins around three years old yesterday and gave them each a handful of dead leaves. Slowly she’s starting to understand that it makes more sense if you wave goodbye before or while someone leaves so they can hear you. She loved Halloween; you could practically see her thinking, “Wait — we walk up to someone’s door, ring their bell, smile at them, they give us colourful things and then talk to us? Bring it on!” We don’t have photos of her because we were rushing from one thing to another, but we intend to dress her up again this coming weekend and take pictures of her then.

Her lower molars are coming in, and are currently huge swollen bumps in her lower jaw. She’s quick to grizzle these days, and has been erupting into small but fierce tantrums when something is taken away from her or she is told she cannot have something that she wants. She’s wearing size 24 months or 2T clothes in general, though we like her in 3T jumpers and dresses and her pants need to be at least 2-3T to accommodate the diapers, and size 5 shoes.

New words are showing up. She loves to eat “chzz” and drink “jsss”, and tell us to “go go go!” A “fsssh” is the first animal she says the name of instead of saying the sound it makes. (Possibly because “bubble bubble bubble” is hard for a fifteen-month-old to say?) Food is “nyum nyum nyum,” and after lunch she goes to the gate at the basement stairs and asks to watch “ss ss sse” (or Sesame Street, for those of you unacquainted with our daily routine). And “No,” is a big new one, usually said while shaking her head. Unfortunately it isn’t always accurate, because she sometimes says “no” and shakes her head when she actually means “yes,” which isn’t part of her vocabulary yet.

She points to steer us when we carry her, and brings books to us excitedly and jabs her finger at the text to make us read it. Her current favourite book is The Pigeon Has Feelings Too by Mo Willems. I read the bus driver’s request for the pigeon to show his happy face, then I look at her, and she draws herself up importantly and says, “Nnno!”, proud that she’s “reading” the next page where the pigeon says, “Never!” And she loves to “ticka ticka ticka” people and cats, which makes all of us laugh. She has developed a somewhat menacing toddler chuckle, which we call her evil chipmunk laugh, low and completely at odds with her cheerful, innocent persona. We all laugh whenever we hear it, which makes her laugh more, which… you get the idea.

(For comparison, here’s Sparky’s fifteen-month post.)

LATER: We went to her 15-month checkup. The good news is that her weight is beginning to level off, and she’s only at the 95th percentile instead of the 97th. (Are you laughing? I did.) She weighs just over 27 pounds. No wonder my lower back hurts! She’s now 32.5 inches tall, too. That’s still 97th percentile. Yikes. Well, this all explains the 2T clothes she needs to be wearing…

An Update On Nixie

Nix came home with me again this afternoon.

The vet examined her and quietly showed me that there were multiple masses, mammary tumours, and that in cats such masses were generally malignant. I’d done my research and I knew the numbers, so it wasn’t a shock. He said in theory they could be removed… but, I pointed out, they’d already regrown once, probably twice, and he couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t regrow yet again. (In fact, he said, “This mass has been here for a while, it was here the last time she was in, wasn’t it?” and I said that no, that one had been removed. So not only has a new one grown back in these past four months, it now has friends.)

Is it cancer? Probably. But to be sure they’d have to do tests and biopsies, and really, even if it was confirmed, there’s nothing anyone could do anyway. So I said I’d like to take her home again to be with us as long as possible until the quality of life dictates otherwise. We worked together to develop a treatment to hopefully heal the wound she created by licking and chewing away at her fur–topical antibiotics, antibiotic pills, and cortisone, plus more bandaging–and the last treatment is love, lots of it.

How long do we have left with her? Who knows? In general, my research has indicated that four to six months is common after the masses show. Except we found and dealt with the first one about three years ago (it was nowhere as extensive as these ones, though), so really, your guess is as good as mine. If it is cancer, it will be a shorter time than a longer one. But every day is precious. She is a strong, healthy, ten-year-old cat, other than the undetermined masses. We will watch her with love and make the decision when it is time, or when she asks us.

Trudge Trudge

I am struggling with a bout of being non-social. I’ve drastically reduced my use of social media, and as you can see I haven’t been blogging much. Part of that comes from not having the time–I’m doing the mum thing all day, and when the kids have been put to bed I sit down at my computer to work–but part of it also comes from fatigue. I don’t have the brainpower to write anything. And if I did, a lot of it would sound the same: Owlet is bouncing off walls and chattering and being cute. Sparky’s current obsession is Angry Birds. HRH and I are tired. I’m the one who’s losing out, of course, since I journal for my own reference. So here’s a scattershot of what’s been going on.

Work-wise, it was independently confirmed by my copy chief that editors are so happy with the work I’m doing on the novels that they’re starting to ask for me by name, which thrills me. I’m pretty much doing a two-week assignment, then I get a week off, and then I do another two weeks of work. So it’s steady.

We had lunch over at the Preston-LeBlanc household on Sunday, and it was so nice. Owlet wandered around completely overcome by all the things to look at and touch, and enjoyed Pasley’s potato-apple-carrot soup immensely, as well as an apple she plucked from a fruit bowl, the first she managed to bite into with the peel still on. Tamu and Pat and Flora stopped by the previous weekend and we delighted in watching BebeFlo and Owlet play together (especially the peekaboo game with a blanket at the end, where they both ducked under it and stood there giggling at one another). We got out to MLG’s fortieth birthday evening at Hurley’s before that, which was also fun, because I hadn’t seen everyone in ages.

HRH installed the new range hood this past weekend, and it’s a definite improvement over the last one. It no longer sounds like an aircraft taking off, as my father-in-law put it when he gave it to us. The only thing left to do is cut a hole in the kitchen wall for the new exhaust pipe. We’ve been without a fan since the attic was converted into the office, as the old exhaust pipe went up there and lay along the ceiling crossbeams on its way to the exterior exhaust vent. Once a floor was laid, there was nowhere for the duct to go (cutting holes through the ceiling crossbeams isn’t such a good idea, you know?), so a new vent needs to be made. That will happen this weekend.

I dyed fibre and spun it for a fellow Raveller, who won it in a draw for prizes in our Ravellenic Games team that she captained, and I’m quite pleased with it. I hope she is, too. It was my first time dyeing more than a bit of fibre to mess about with. I used Ziplock microwave steaming bags (which was an interesting experience in itself), and did the four ounces of fibre in four one-ounce batches. She requested raspberry and tangerine, and I blended a very nice colour for both from my Jacquard acid dyes, which of course blended and subtly altered when I spun it up. I did a DK/light worsted two-ply yarn, and I gt at least 300 yards out of it. It plumped up beautifully after a wash. Canada Post tells me that it’s out for delivery in her area right now, so she may have it today!

I am currently sewing the Halloween costumes for both kids, and mostly enjoying myself, although doing it in fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there is a bit frazzling. I lose my train of thought and a sense of what I’d planned to do next, or how to do it. (I am working without patterns for both of them, because I don’t have enough stress in my life.) I made a lovely pair of polar fleece pantaloons for Owlet, complete with two deep lace ruffles on the legs, and they’re possibly the most adorable things ever. I used polar fleece for warmth, because nights at the end of October around here are usually quite chilly. I made her a mob cap as well with polar fleece on the inside, but it’s smaller than I thought, so I need more deep lace to sew around the edge so it looks less ridiculous.

The last bit of current news is the worst. Today Nixie goes to the vet, and I suspect that she is not coming home. I am spending as much time as possible with her today. At the very least, the large, weeping, overgroomed area on her chest has become infected; at the worst, the overgrooming is directly related to a possible recurrence of the mass that was removed as part of her surgery this past spring, which makes the third appearance of it, and as something like 80% of feline tumours are malignant, even if we get it removed it will just happen again. We don’t have the money for tests and biopsies in the first place, nor treatment if the worst is confirmed. Sparky and I had a hard cry this morning when I reminded him that she was going to the vet today and she might not come home, and he railed against the injustice of it all: “I don’t want Nixie to die! I want her to come home! She is the best cat!” Of course you do, sweetheart; we all do. No one wants her to die. But things die, and we can’t stop it. It doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and our hearts hurt so much, but it is a truth, and something we have to face, either now or in a few months, or a few years. When I dropped him off at school he met his friends at the schoolyard gate and stopped there, and I wondered why he didn’t go all the way in. And then I saw one of the girls put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and I understood what was happening: as soon as he’d arrived told them that Nix was sick, possibly too sick to come home, sharing his grief and his hurt, and they were sympathizing with him.

At best, I am hoping that they will be able to prescribe antibiotics and come up with a solution to cover the wound so it can heal properly, because everything I’ve tried has failed. At worst, I have to make the decision that every pet owner hates to make. Somewhere in the middle lies the “we can’t do anything but make her comfortable” diagnosis, and if that is what happens I will probably bring her home again until her quality of life deteriorates to unacceptable levels. Because right now her quality of life seems good: she is still eating well, moving in her usual fashion, using the litter box, purring and enjoying the occasional cuddle, and I am weak, and it feels wrong to say goodbye when she seems so normal other than the infected wound. Her energy hasn’t changed at all, and with every other cat we have known when they were tired, ill, and suffering, even though all of them were stoic they way cats are, because we are attentive and sensitive to that sort of thing. Nix doesn’t project any of that. Knowing when to make that decision is the hardest part of this whole process.

I’m so tired. I think the fibro is starting to creep back, as I’m having trouble focusing on things, lacking the energy to be happy and enjoy my hobbies, the body aches and weak hands are here again, sleep is not restful, and my appetite has vanished. Part of this could be attributable to the time of year, but I suspect that the fibro-quashing pregnancy and year of postnatal adrenaline and hormones are finally done with, and my body is slowly creeping back to normal operative levels. It is not fun. I am trying to find joy in small things, and it is very difficult. I don’t have much time to read, or spin. I can sometimes knit for a row or two. But most of my baby-nap time is taken up by cooking or baking or tidying or work or errands. And it’s all very well to think that this time next year she’ll be in daycare, which is exciting because we know she will love it, but that does not help me now.

Post Alert

Owlet’s thirteen-month post is up and backdated to 4 September 2012, so you’ll need to scroll down. Or just click this handy link instead.

If you read via RSS, you already know this, so hurrah, thank you for playing, and disregard this note. Go have an awesome day! Actually, everyone should have awesome day, whether they read my posts via RSS or otherwise. Also cake. Go have cake.

Ups and Downs

Things have been trudging along.

Work-wise, things are hopping. This is Good for the keeping busy (like I am not busy enough already) and for making money, but Bad for sleep and time management. I did a crazy amount of work over Labour Day weekend, and HRH took election day off to kid-wrangle so I could work, too. I invoiced for the novel last night, and it was a 35-hour job. It was a huge invoice, the biggest I’ve ever submitted, but I did a lot and I wasn’t going to scale the invoice down to avoid looking like I was overcharging. This morning I got a thank you from the copy chief, for my attention to detail, my stylesheet, and my memo to the editor. Apparently I am unique in these latter two things, something that kind of makes me go “huh?”. Sure, I’ve never done a stylesheet before, but that’s because all my previous edits have been to CMoS style or house style, if it differs from CMoS somehow, so it wasn’t necessary. This time, it was definitely required because I did some book-specific formatting that needed to be pointed out and explained to layout/editors/author, so I made it. And no one other than I writes memos to the editors, explaining key changes or areas that need to be looked at? Really? It just seems like a very intelligent idea to me, as well as polite, so I do it every time. And evidently they like me for it, so yay team me!

In the Bad column, Nixie has not been well again. She’s had some kind of abscess on her chest that drained on its own, and seems to be healing, but it was messy and not great for a little while, and we were pretty close to thinking that was that. She’s perked up again, which is nice, but we’re keeping a close eye on her. I was exploring her stomach the other night and thought I’d found another abscess, then I realised that it was the scar tissue from her surgery earlier this year. Whew.

Also in the Bad column, last Friday my sewing machine broke. There was a huge clunk and now the thread take-up is jammed into the machine, and seems to no longer be connected to anything inside when I open the faceplate and check things out. I turn the wheel and everything moves except that. I admit that I cried when I tried everything I could to fix it and nothing worked. I can’t afford to have it fixed. It broke while sewing replacement Velcro to an all-in-one diaper, a slow ongoing project I’ve been handling for the past couple of months because I can’t afford to buy new diapers, not even secondhand ones. I was only halfway done the twelve I have of this style that needed the Velcro replaced; the ones that need to be overhauled have just been sitting in a pile unused all summer because they don’t stay fastened anymore. I hate that when I’m trying to save money, something happens to make it worse. It was so incredibly frustrating. To fix it would likely be at least a hundred dollars — sewing machine repair does not come cheap — for a basic checkup, cleaning, and labour, and that’s assuming it’s a simple fix that doesn’t require a replacement part of some kind. It means buying a new one would make more sense, which also frustrates me, because I try to repair things instead of replacing them, and this disposable culture does not facilitate that. So I started searching secondhand listings and bookmarking potential machines to follow up on when I got a bit of extra cash. (That wasn’t looking good, either.)

In the Good column — no scratch that; in the Stupendously Amazing column, UPS knocked at my door this morning and had me sign for an enormous box. It was a new sewing machine, purchased for me by my online friends from the July 2011 Moms group I’m a member of through Ravelry. I sat down and cried again, but for a very different reason. I’m so close to these women, and most of us have never even met. We talk about good things and bad things that happen to us, share news about our kids, support one another, and have fun together. We’ve pulled together to help one another, too, now and again; I just never expected it to be directed at me like this. I am so very blessed to have friends who help me when I’m down. I haven’t even opened the actual machine yet. It is so beautiful, and has so many fancy stitches, and I promise to get it tuned up every year or so so that I will have it for years and years to come. It has something like forty stitches programmed into it. I think it has more memory in it than the first computer my family bought back in ’89.

And finally, to cap off the Good column, I FOUND MY MISSING LIBRARY BOOK! I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here. In early July, a book I’d borrowed went missing. It just vanished. It wasn’t on the shelf where I keep our library books, it wasn’t on any other bookshelf in the house, it wasn’t in either of the kids’ rooms, and I never take library books out of the house… it had just disappeared. I renewed it the maximum number of times I was allowed and kept looking for it, to no avail. It drove me absolutely crazy. Finally, last Friday, I went to the library and told them that it was lost, and learned that replacement value was going to be $27. It really rankled that I had to pay $27 for a book that I hadn’t finished, and hadn’t even been enjoying overmuch, and life being what it is, I knew that the odds of finding it right after I’d paid for it were high, so I’d end up owning a book I felt meh about. I was going to go to the bank the next day to get the money, as it was the final due date. That morning, I saw Owlet kick a piece of Lego under the bookcase in the hall. I hadn’t known there was a slim space under it; I thought the front of the base went all the way to the floor. I lay down to reach underneath and get the Lego, and I found the missing book. (I know what happened, too: Owlet pulls the books off the library shelf, so it probably fell, and she kicked it under the shelf by accident just like she accidentally kicked the Lego. I also found a plastic turtle under there.) So I saved the $27 replacement fee, and I got the smug satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t lose it after all! I knew it was in the house somewhere.

Bonus Good thing: Today I got the cheque for my second freelance project that I finished at the end of July. Whew. It will be another five weeks before I get another one, so this smallish one has to last. (That’s a nice thought, but it will be gone in about ten days to pay bills. Still! Better to have it and finally be able to pay them, right?)

Owlet turned thirteen months old yesterday. I have a skeleton of her monthly post in a file, but I can’t finish it till Friday. Actually, there’s a lot that I can do again as of Friday, when I have handed in all my current work. This post was sketches and Tweets and Ravelry posts, collected together for posterity, pieced together during five-minute breaks, but the monthly posts are too complicated for that.

Sparky’s New School

So last Wednesday (yeah, I’ve been busy, more on that later) was Sparky’s first day at his new school in his French grade two class…

… and he had a blast.

He’d been worried, and we’d been worried as to how he’d handle it. We did everything we could to prep him, including a tour of the grounds and a secret tour with his principal of the inside of the school the last night before school began, after studying French with him all summer and being supportive and encouraging, but it was all up to him after we saw him off into the building, following his new teacher. He came and gave us a few hugs while everyone milled around and lined up, and he nearly cried once, but he was very brave, and we are so proud of him. We introduced him to a random nice-seeming kid whose mother had bought him up to check in with the teacher just before we did, and he found a friend that he’d been in kindergarten with in his other school, too. So we felt better about the not-knowing-anyone part by the time they went in to class, anyway.

We know this is the right thing to do — his other school was just too easy, and we didn’t want him to run into the ‘I’m bored so I’ll stop trying’ trap at some point — but we also know it’s going to be challenging. Which is kind of the point, but still, as a parent, you hate doing anything that causes your child distress, even if it’s for a brief period. It will take a couple of months for everything to settle properly, but an awesome first day does a lot for everyone’s outlook.

In the interest of full revelation, I asked him how he’d done with the French, and he said, “Fine! Rebecca (the friend he’d known in kindergarten) translated everything for me!” Which is not exactly… well, whatever. It all starts somewhere, right? And we know he does understand a lot more than he can speak.

The nerves hit on the second day, though. I got a call from the office just past ten o’clock saying that Sparky wasn’t feeling well and could I come and pick him up? Owlet had just gone down for her nap, and I suspected he wasn’t actually ill, so I said I’d be there by ten-thirty. Five minutes later the phone rang again, and the receptionist said to hold off, because the principal had overheard who was in the office and now had him in her own office for a talk. The principal called me afterwards and we agreed that it had been nerves (although there was an element of seasonal allergy there, stuffing him up and making him a bit unhappy), and that to bring him home would make going back the next day even harder. So I picked him up as planned at lunch, as it was a half-day, and he was much better. I don’t know what we’d do without this principal. She’s part of why we decided to make the switch, and she’s been just wonderful.

Friday was the first full day, and when I met him outside under the trees he was bouncing. First of all, he’d lost his eighth tooth, always an exciting event at school. His teacher had put it in a little blue treasure chest for him, and he refused to put it under his pillow. (“Because it’s much more valuable to me than the Tooth Fairy, Mama,” he explained that night. Um… okay?) But there was something else, too.

“Mama, I learned two new French words today!” he said with great enthusiasm. “Really?” I said, very pleased. “Which ones?” And then he proceeded to rattle off, ”Est-ce que je peut aller a la toilette,” and “Est-ce que je peut aller boire de l’eau”, both of which are significantly more than two new words! And he said them clearly and with good accent, like it was easy, and it was. I should have known he’d learn better from people who were not his parents. It’s the same reason I didn’t start teaching him cello, but sent him to my teacher instead. We can teach him general skills, but when it comes to formal teaching, he learns better from someone else. Being in a group of kids who are all speaking French helps, too. It’s just like how he walked a week into going to a caregiver with other kids who could walk, after choosing not to at home for a couple of months.

So, school is just fine so far. He is positive and excited about it, for which we are very thankful. I’m so very proud of him for handling it the way he’s doing.

(And wow, do I ever need a new icon for Sparky.)

Owlet: Thirteen Months Old!

Okay, where are we at? Dear gods, she’s thirteen months old.

Owlet has, in the past month, totally gotten into:

  • feeding others (crackers I can stomach, especially is they’re not soggy, but she feeds me raisins and I have to pretend I like them because she won’t take no for an answer)
  • blowing kisses
  • saying and waving bye-bye
  • lying down on blankets, taking about seven point two seconds of rest before she’s up and running again
  • pushing things along the floor or through the air, going “vrrrrr, vrrrr” (like blocks, the laundry basket, and books. And a Little People black sheep, as well. That cracked me up. I decided it was a steampunk cyborg sheep.)
  • taking people’s hands and cupping them to her cheek, then cradling her head in them (so, so sweet)
  • finally, cuddles! She climbs up and puts her arms around your neck, then leans her head against your shoulder, and it’s just so wonderful. Sometimes she even pats our shoulder or arm while she does it.

    • New skills include:

  • Opening our lever door handles (Jana, [from my online mums group, see below] whose son demonstrated this new skill just about the same time, said that it feels like that moment when the velociraptors in Jurassic Park figure it out)
  • Swinging open the gate barricade we prop across the hall with ease (it’s not like it’s hinged and latched like our other ones, but it is wedged pretty firmly)
  • Climbing stairs like whoa, if we let her
  • Practicing the sliding-off-beds-and-chesterfields move

    • Big events this past month:

  • We met Jana, an online friend from BC, when she came to visit family in Montreal with her husband and son, who was born a couple of weeks before Owlet (we met via that online mums group, were everyone’s babies were due in July 2011). I packed the kids up and bought picnic lunch stuff, and we met at Lafontaine Park where we picnicked and played and talked. It was awesome. There was swinging (complete with chortles from them both), playing in the sand, dropping sticks and leaves down sewers, and eating of leaves. I am eternally grateful for this group; I have met so many wonderful women.
  • Owlet had her first experiment with crayons. She likes to see the lines she makes, but she isn’t entirely clear on which end or side to use. Lesson learned: Hand her one crayon at a time, and hide the others behind your back so she can’t see the box. And be ready to grab them if she starts lifting them toward her mouth.

    • New foods… I can’t remember any more. She eats everything. She’s had tastes of peanut butter and we haven’t seen any problems, so I assume she’s okay with it. Daily schedule-wise, she’s up around 6:30, naps from 9:30-11:00ish, naps from 2:00-3:30ish, and sleeps from about 7:30 to 6:30 the next morning.

    She has two huge swollen lumps where her one-year-old molars are coming in her upper jaw. No wonder she gets grouchy.

    Her twelve-month doctor appointment was terrific. She weighed 11.92 kg (26 lbs), and measured 78 cm. She’s still around the 97th percentile. The doctor is delighted with her and told me to keep on doing whatever I’m doing. She’s doing very well mobility-wise (she told me she expects one-year-olds to be cruising along furniture) and language-wise (again, she expects about three words at this age, so while I feel that Owlet is behind where she should be because Sparky set a crazy standard, she’s actually ahead of the average). She and Sparky walked in holding hands and slowly strolled down the row of clinic receptionists while smiling, as if they were showing off how adorable they were. The coos from the receptionists and nurses were hilarious.

    A couple of weeks ago she was standing in front of me eating a cracker. She looked at me and made her grabby-hand “I want food/more/milk please” sign. But she already had a cracker, so I was curious as to what she wanted. When I didn’t clue in, she made a little frustrated huff sound, reached the cracker out and banged my chest, then made her little grabby-hand sign again. “Oh, you want some milk with your cracker?” I said. “Mah, mah,” she said, all excited. So I picked her up and put her on my lap, and she sat there and nursed for a minute, then popped off, had a bite of cracker, then had some more milk, and so forth. I was very amused.

    We can’t leave anything on a placemat within her reach, because she pulls the placemat over and helps herself to what’s on the plate or in the glass. A couple of weeks ago I turned around to find her holding HRH’s coffee cup nonchalantly, with a huge coffee stain down her chest and across her lap. (The coffee was cool, fortunately.) She is fascinated by cups of tea and coffee. This morning she was talking to my Davids Tea mug with the silhouettes of birds on it, and kept peeking inside. It was cool enough that I told her she could sip it if she liked. She dipped a finger in to touch the surface instead, and sucked the tea off.

    She loves telephones, but she doesn’t quite get the idea. She knows she can hear the person talking so she reaches for it when I use it. She gets a huge grin when I put the receiver to her ear, but then she puts it in front of her to look at the receiver, kisses it with her big open-mouthed “mwah!”, and then presses as many buttons as possible with her thumbs before someone rescues it.

    She tried to grab the broom repeatedly from HRH when he swept up after dinner, so I found Sparky’s tiny broom for her to use. She loves it. Although after she swept a couple of times that night, she turned it around and started using it like a lightsaber against a chair. Perhaps we shouldn’t have taught her to play Jedi with Sparky in the backyard with the extra lightsaber toy…

    I love watching Owlet and Sparky play together. The older she gets, the more he seems to love her and actively want to play with her, which is delightful. Their favourite games seem to be “hide under the blanket and try to find me,” “pile on top of Sparky,” and “push Owlet around in a laundry basket while she chortles.” She loves coming with me to drop him and collect him at school; there are dogs to look at, and cats that sit on the street corners, and all! those! people! to wave at and say “Bye-bye” to. There are problems, of course, namely that with her newfound ability to unwedge the hall barrier and open doors, she wants to be in Sparky’s room with him when he’s playing on his own with non Owlet-friendly toys like Lego. But in general, they genuinely like one another, and I am so grateful for that.

    (For comparison purposes: Here is Sparky’s thirteen-month post.)