Category Archives: The Girl

Owlet: Nineteen Months Old!

Oh, the words. New this month are: Mushroom, tomato (“may toe”), drink, toes, flowers, butterflies, bug, bath (we must be careful saying this, as she will beetle directly into the bathroom, start drumming the edge of tub with her hands, and say, “Bath. Bath? Bath!” then get very cross if we say that it isn’t a bath night), dance, again, UP-down, outside, happy! happy! happy!, happy baby, angry! grr (that’s all one unit: “Angry!grr“), mine, sky, sun,moon, and sad.

This month also saw her first three-word sentence: “Where Papa go?”

Singing has suddenly exploded as well. Owlet sings “Twinkle” with me, not that anyone would necessarily recognize it. We started off with her supplying the last word in each line, but now she burbles along. She sings the “ABC” song with Sparky, too, much to his delight, although most of the letters are e, d, or g. She also sings “Baa baa black sheep,” with some serious head-banging for the “yes sir” bits. (It’s so serious that we can’t sing it if we’re sitting at a table, because she will crack her forehead on it.) She sang the first two lines of the Cat in the Hat theme song when it appeared on PBS today, much to the astonishment of Sparky and me. It’s very simple and mostly repetitive; I’m not surprised that she can sing “Go, go, go, go” of course, but “on an adventure” was kind of a shock. (It was more like “onna vedjur,” but it was in time and on beat.) We read Goodnight Moon and I can pause to let her fill in lots of the items listed throughout it, too.

Furniture-moving is one of her newest pastimes. She likes to shove her bench out into the middle of the living room to stand on it. In the kitchen, if I’m doing something on a counter, she’ll drag a chair over to counter next to me, climb it, stands to help me bake. (Which, yesterday, involved her dropping a whole measuring cup into the Kitchenaid bowl, and sinking her entire hand into cake batter after it had been poured into the pan. So helpful.) We can’t build tents as easily as we could in the old living room with Sparky, who adored them, but sometimes I can manage this:

Another of her idiosyncrasies is her pretend sleep: She’ll flop over and start snoring really loudly… with her eyes open, watching us. Too funny! She has also discovered stickers. The kids got Brave sticker books from Santa when they saw him at Christmas, and she dragged one out the other day. Stickers are awesome! They stick to things! Like noses! And doors! And the fridge! And the cat! Thank goodness these ones are designed to peel off and restick in the book, but even they pick up dust and grime and stop sticking. Time to pick some assorted sticker books up in the dollar store now and then and tuck them away for days when we need something new.

Poor Owlet. We had a horrible February, as all four of her canines decided to come in at once. They were huge, swollen, white lumps in her gums, and she was miserable. The top two broke through two days apart during the first week of March, and the right bottom one has just emerged. The bottom left one is still a lump, but she’s back to her usual cheerful self. I think her appetite is finally slowing down. But that may have been the teeth. She still steals tea even though I give her her own.

We seem to be stuck between one two-hour (or more) nap, and two hour and a half-long naps. It’s hard. We kind of play it by ear as the day goes. Some days she makes it till past 10:30 and naps for two hours. Most days she goes down around 10, and naps for only 1.5 ish hours. If that happens I gauge her mood and usuallyput her down for a catnap around 2:30. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m thinking the time change may actually help us out in this respect.

She really loves sitting on the big potty. None of this kid potty thing for her! No, if everyone else uses the big one, she will too. So I got the child insert from storage and she cheerfully asks to sit on it several times a day, reading books or brushing her teeth. Nothing has actually happened yet, but it has to at some point.

Colouring is going better. Except she has to be supervised extremely carefully, because apparently our wood-based decor is in need of some colour. I went to pour another cup of tea the other day and when I came back twenty seconds later, I found red crayon on the floor. So I scrubbed it off with a tissue, saying, “No! Crayons go on paper.” And because she loves to clean and I wanted to reinforce the lesson, I handed her the tissue and asked her to help clean it up. She scrubbed at the mark industriously, and then turned and scrubbed at the mark she’d made on the bookshelf, then the other bookshelf, the spines of the books on that second bookshelf, the spinning wheel, and her bench. (!!!)

Sometimes she goes after Gryff, saying, “No! No, meow!” then a string of baby gibberish that very clearly tells the cat off for doing whatever she thinks he’s not supposed to do. Granted, we do shoo him away from various places and things, so it’s definitely imitative behaviour. Once she kept yelling at him to get him away from his dish, and it took us a moment or two to realise that she was imitating us shooing him away from Cricket’s dish when she imagines something is scaring her and runs off, leaving food in her bowl. So we find ourselves now having to tell Owlet that no, it’s all right, the cat is allowed to do whatever he’s doing. Except in the past couple of days we’ve noticed her shooing Cricket away from her own bowl, so apparently she thinks no cat is ever supposed to eat from that bowl, ever.

Her hair is a lovely honey colour, a warm light brown. Her curls are getting longer, which means the weight is pulling them down a bit and they’re becoming more waves with a half-ringlet at the bottom. Her hair dries super-curly, but it’s so fine that the curl slips out of it after sleeping or wearing a hat. Sometimes she reaches for my green spray bottle in the bathroom, and I spray her hair and squish it into curls for her. She loves the spray bottle, thank goodness. We’re sweeping her uneven, thin bangs to the side at the moment, but I wonder if trimming them to an even fringe might work better. (My heart just about stops every time I consider that. My baby can’t possibly be old enough to need a haircut.)

Owlet: Eighteen Months Old!

Officially a year and a half! I am trying not to think of all the adorable 18-month clothes I had to take out of rotation ages ago. We’re into 2-3T, leaning toward 3T, as it has the length she needs. She’s a few ounces shy of 30 pounds and is 82 cm tall, according to this week’s doctor appointment.

I think the cutest thing that has developed over the past couple of months is Owlet hiding something, then raising both hands up into the air to either side of her head, cupping them as she shrugs a bit and says, “Where go?” in a hilariously angsty voice. It’s followed by, “Hmm,” with a finger touching one of her cheeks and a little furrowed brow as she feigns thinking. When she or someone else reveals the hidden item, she grins impishly and says, “Peeyaboh!”

We’ve had a word explosion lately. Ears, eyes, mouth, nose, hair, baby, nigh-nigh, see you, flower, butterfly, teeth please, tea please, bear, bug, sun, moon, star, all gone, Daddy, up-down-up-down. She said “merci” to the crossing guard and waved a couple of weeks ago. Her way of asking for something is to point at it and say, “yes, please.” If we don’t respond, or explain that she can’t have it for whatever reason, she gets quite cross and repeats, “yes, please, YES, PLEASE” over and over quite imperiously. She has a very clear and chirpy “Thank you!” that she uses when anyone hands her something. She will spill her milk at the table on purpose so she can say “Uh-oh” and wipe it up with a cloth. When she’s finished her meal she says “Aaaaall done,” and hands her plate to an adult to be cleared, the way everyone else does at the table. Her obsession with saying “cheers!” and clinking glasses has relaxed; now she only does it once or twice per meal, and is much more focused instead of waving her glass around wildly.

There are two things she has become obsessed with in its place, though. First is brushing her teeth. She adores the whole process and goes into the bathroom several times a day to pull her little stepstool over and call for her toothbrush. Most of the time I can get away without the toothpaste, but she insists on her brush and a glass of water to dip it in so she can happily chew on it and and suck the water off. There’s a full-scale meltdown if she isn’t ready to stop when you need her to stop, even after twenty minutes of happily playing there. She will happily try to brush other people’s teeth, and has gone after Gryffindor with her toothbrush. (We caught her in time.) The problem is all brushes are fair game, so she tries to dip her hairbrush in the water glass and chew on it, too. And sometimes she tries to brush her hair with the toothbrush. She’s been practising drinking out of the open cup after brushing her teeth as well.

The other obsession is tea. I got tired of fighting with her over my teacup, so I got her one of the sippy cups with handles that didn’t work for her when we’d originally got it, filled it mostly with warm tap water, then added some tea. She adores it, sucking it back and handing me the empty cup and clamouring for more. So now I have two kids who think going to the tea store is an enormous treat. I make a whole pot all the time now, because someone will be asking for their own cup, and making a single cup isn’t efficient any more. Although having her own cup isn’t a guarantee that she won’t pester me for a sip from my cup, or dip her fingers in to lick the tea off if I left it on an end table instead of out of her reach.

Playing has become more complex. She loves her play silks that my friend Elizabeth dyed for her, using them as capes or scarves, wrapping toys in them, or pulling them over her head and wandering around, giggling. Her Little People mini stable and mini cottage see a lot of play, as does her bus. She likes to sit on a tiny bench and spread her crayons out on her love seat, flipping pages in her sketchbook and scribbling all over the place. It’s an instant toddler dance party when the dance music or the British Grenadiers march from the Pride & Prejudice score comes on, or “That’s What Bilbo Baggins Hates” from the Hobbit score. (We clocked five plays of that one in a loop before we had to call an end to it, exhausted from whirling her around the room.) She’s really gotten into the Wheely Bug this past month, too, zooming around on it. One of her latest quirks involves taking a parent’s hand and walking them around and around the living room, through kitchen, down hall, and back into living room. It’s like she’s doing the Regency ‘taking a turn about the room’ thing.

She is voluntarily expanding her bedtime routine. After supper she changes into jammies, marches down the hall where we brush her teeth, she says nigh-nigh to Liam, and walks back to her room. I pick her up and she says goodnight to things: Nigh-nigh moon (the birchbark moon hanging on her door), nigh-nigh other moon (the wooden cutout above her door), nigh-nigh fairy and fairy owl. Then nigh-nigh Mama, with a very sweet kiss. Then she is handed to Daddy for her bottle and bed, and waves to me, sometimes catching my hand to swing it a bit while I give her one last kiss on the forehead. When I put her down for a nap, she strokes my face gently with the satin or plush blanket parts of her blanket bunny, sharing it between stroking her own cheek.

She is now giving perfect, gentle little ‘mwah’ kisses, a nice change from wet open-mouthed kissing with teeth bared! She is giving very good hugs now, too, with arms around the neck and the head laid on a shoulder, complete with gentle patting on the back. She has decided that shaking hands with new people is excellent, and she has a very matter-of-fact shake, too, not goofy or simpery.

The communication thing is part of the toddler development that fascinates me. It’s so exciting to be able to say, “Do you want X?” and have her think for a split second before she shakes her head and says, “No,” very clearly with a tinge of melancholy. We have to play the suggestion game till we hit on what she does want, though, which can get frustrating for everyone. But sometimes we know exactly what she wants, because in general she is very good at getting her point across. Like she loves to sit at the table on a Big Person Chair, especially for snacks, lunches, and homework time. She is Very Serious about her homework. Or maybe it’s about her shared homework time with Sparky.

Milestone: Check

We were sitting on the kitchen floor this morning, watching a batch of oat-banana-cranberry toddler-size muffins bake in the oven. Owlet pointed at the oven and blew in short little huffs, which is her way of indicating something is too hot to touch. (She picked it up because we blow on hot things to cool them down enough to handle and eat.) Then she pointed at the reflections and babbled a bit. “Who’s that?” I said. I touched my chest, then hers, and said, “That’s Mama; that’s Owlet.” She tried to sound out the name, so I repeated it with very clear enunciation. And she repeated it after me, very clearly. “Who’s that?” I said, pointing at her reflection. And she said the name very clearly again.

Baby can finally say her own name? Check.

Owlet: Seventeen Months!

Owlet napped while we decorated the Christmas tree, and when she came out she stood there and gazed at it for a while. Then she took a deep breath, and said, “Wow!” I taught her how to lie under it and look up through the branches to see all the lights twinkling off the ornaments, and she and Sparky did that for a while together. She tried to reach out and touch an ornament with a finger, but I said, “No, we look with our eyes, not our fingers.” She put both hands behind her back and leaned forward as far as she could, as if she was trying to touch it with her nose instead of a finger, and repeated, “Wow,” very reverently. She put together her first word combo while looking at the tree later, too. “Purple ball,” she said, pointing into the branches at the single tiny purple bauble we have. I’d never even heard her say purple before. And a few days after Christmas she pointed at the top branches and said, “Buhd.” As we have about four birds in close proximity up there, we’re pretty sure that’s what she was saying.

Oh, the words. The words are tumbling out of her at a surprising rate. (Well, okay, it’s surprising to me because Sparky was atypically talking up a storm at ten months, remember.) Apart from “purple ball,” we had “purple bottle” (also unprompted, while looking at a book), “haus” (“Bye-bye, haus,” she said one day as we were heading out), and “awl” (her pronunciation of “owl”) has become “ah-wuh-ull.” She has become obsessed with pretending things are telephones, and holds random things up to her ear and says, “Haow, Dad-eh! Haow!” She can say “Ada,” and suddenly started saying “Papa” very clearly on New Year’s Day over at her grandparents’ house. She started saying “peese” and “ah! oo!” or “tans” voluntarily at the correct times (although she still needs prompting if she moves directly to stuffing whatever she’s asked for into her mouth), pointed to the moon in a new picture book and said “moon!”, and says “cookie” very clearly (sigh – fortunately, graham crackers are her cookies). And there are others that I am completely forgetting because I don’t write them down quickly enough and my mind goes blank when I sit down to write these posts. Physically, she’s getting better and better at controlling her body. She has started colouring reliably with crayons instead of eating them, and finally managed to stack two blocks carefully instead of banging the top one down on the bottom one and sending them both flying. Her use of forks and spoons is improving. She learned how to say “cheers!” and clink her glass, right in time for New Year’s Eve. She can now climb up on the living room chesterfield, the last seat she was having difficulty with.

One morning she was trying to yank open the child-locked pantry door and getting frustrated. HRH said, “Come away from there, you’ve already had your breakfast.” She wound up a whine, stopped; started a frustrated cry, stopped; made a grr sound; then stood there and looked at him, and said, ”Peeeeeese?” He opened the cupboard and gave her three goldfish crackers. She was very pleased with herself, and said “ah oo” when prompted.
There are still moments where she is all toddler, though. While waiting in line at a store before Christmas, she was saying, “eh, eh, eh” and making her little grabby-hand signal to get me to give her some more corn puffs. I prompted her for the please, I got a muffled “pss,” and gave her a couple of puffs. As I did, I said, “What do you say?” Her enthusiastic response was, “YAY!”

We’ve had a couple of toddler meltdowns these past couple of weeks, too. I think I’ve finally figured out the root of it. After not showing any desire to help, Owlet suddenly and out of the blue wants to hold everything and feed herself. First it was holding both the container of yoghurt and the spoon, and feeding herself. Then it was holding the little bag of crackers and feeding herself, instead of me putting some in her bowl a little at a time. She’s never had real tantrums before, and these are full-blown screaming, red-faced, throwing things, arching the back breakdowns. She’s getting more aggressive about demanding snacks from the pantry, too, and melting down when I try to portion it out one serving at a time. I can’t give her the entire box of crackers or Cheerios, or the entire carton of juice, though.

One of the adorable milestones this past month: first ponytails!

The weekend we saw Santa, she had a three-hour nap in the middle of the day instead of two naps lasting a hour and a half each. This could be a very useful development, giving me more time to get things done both when she’s awake and asleep, making it easier to schedule stuff, and actually allowing her a bit more sleep since I won’t be trying to get her down by two, having her fuss till two-thirty, then waking her up at three-thirty to go get Sparky after school. That said, attempts to shift her morning nap later for a midday nap start time worked, but she still only slept an hour and a half, which made for a wholly strung out toddler come about four o’clock. So we’ll stick to the two-nap schedule for a bit longer.

What bit of nursing that has remained has been decreasing bit by bit, at Owlet’s pace, and is for comfort only. She dropped her good-morning nursing session about a month ago, though she’d beetle over and ask to nurse after HRH left for work every couple of days or so, but that stopped in the middle of December. She usually snuggles and comfort nurses to sleep for a couple of minutes before her morning nap, but she dropped that a few times over the holiday, and I suspect it’s not long now before she just snuggles with her soother till she’s in a doze. We settle down to do the same thing for her afternoon nap, but lately she’s refused to nurse and asked for a bottle, and even then she hasn’t been able to get to a doze on my lap and I’ve had to put her down awake, which she grizzles about for a few minutes before banging around and then falling asleep. (Did I ever share what she calls nursing? She asks for “neyneyney.” I don’t know where she got it from, because we always called it just milk (or “the milks”). But she’s called it that for a few months now.) The holiday schedule has been really distracting, to say the least; wake-up times are a bit different, and everyone’s home, and Sparky is watching cartoons or playing video games or running around with her, and she’s very stimulated. Naps have been frustrating for everyone.

Now that her last molar is in (and a weary parental huzzah for that), we need to start switching that night bottle to a cup. We tried it about six weeks ago, but the molar gave her too much trouble both with the drinking motion and the unsettled being-on-edge mood. The bottle was more familiar and soothing.

The only thing better than reading in a laundry basket is sharing the laundry basket with the cat, right?

The other day she was feeding Gryffindor with the small wooden spoon I’d given her for her kitchen, after stirring something up in a little bowl. I’d noticed that the mums in my online group were talking about how their children were developing nurturing relationships with their dolls, feeding them and changing them and so forth, and just yesterday I kind of shrugged and said to myself that maybe Owlet just hasn’t clicked like that yet. Most of her preferred toys are animals, and while she sometimes undresses her girl doll or giggles at the belly button on the little boy doll she inherited from Sparky, she doesn’t seem to have a specific connection to them. And then I saw this happening, and thought that it was just adorable. And the cat was being so patient with her. He is also very patient with her full-body hugs, and her attempts to hold her pretend phones to his ears.

I am so glad we decided on giving her a play kitchen. She has spent a significant amount of time at it since Christmas. So has Sparky, who does little crazy cooking shows. So much so that we have to remind him not to crowd Owlet out and to let her play in her own way with it, even if it’s wrong according to how he knows a kitchen works or according to his plans for whatever he’s ‘making.’

And finally, here is the first use of the full snowsuit, in the situation for which it was designed:

Christmas 2012

There’s a lot to catch up on, so please bear with me over the next couple of days, gentle readers.

Christmas was lovely. We had a wonderful day with our families. I received books and gift cards and chocolate as gifts, plus new baking sheets and silicone muffin pans and little kitchen things. The children adored all their gifts and were beautifully behaved. The food was excellent and the turkey much complimented. At the end of it all I was tired, and I’d done something to my lower back, but I was very pleased indeed with how the day was managed. Making Christmas for others is really special.

I have felt very peaceful and happy this Christmas. We seem to be between colds, we have had good snow and now it’s bright and clear, we weren’t scrambling at the last minute for anything, and all the food was planned. I remembered to pick up sausage meat and peas this year, and I remembered to set a batch of dough for rolls to rise when I got up on Christmas Eve morning. I think Owlet’s kitchen has had a lot to do with how much I was looking forward to it all this year. It has been so much fun planning and executing it. (What? Have I not mentioned Owlet’s kitchen here? HRH built her a play kitchen. We designed it and he started putting it together after classes ended at school and the workshop was pretty much empty. Read on for pictures!)

In our house we are heartless and cruel, and no one opens gifts on Christmas morning until the grandparents get here late in the morning, after Owlet’s nap. (We’ve always done it that way, so Sparky doesn’t know that other kids wake up before dawn, heh heh.) Owlet’s kitchen had been placed in our kitchen, but she hadn’t seen it because HRH whisked her right downstairs to open her stocking on our bed when she woke up. (Sparky does that, too; he wakes up and his stocking is hanging on his doorknob, and he can open that and play with whatever’s inside it; the candy is fair game to snack on, too. Although he came down at 5:45 to excitedly catalogue everything that had been inside it, and then again to make sure that it was okay to eat some of the jellybeans.)

EXCEPT.

There was a chaise longue waiting in my attic office Christmas morning. Apparently HRH didn’t want me to be jealous of Owlet’s kitchen, so he built a chaise longue for me.

I just. You know? Words failed me. And then I think I started to laugh, and laughed for a while. I adore chaises longues, and we toyed with the idea of getting one for the living room when we bought the house, but they were all too big for the space and expensive. He’s been building this on and off with scrap bits of wood at work for over a year, and keeping it a magnificent secret. He hid it in the shed after bringing it home, and wrestled it up the stairs on Christmas Eve. Sparky must be commended for keeping the secret, too, because he was with HRH when he bought the goosefeather-filled linen pillows for it at Ikea when they got the Christmas tree.

More pictures! Owlet meets her kitchen! It was her first gift of the day. She looks so serene. And yes, those are owls in the shelf brackets.

She wanted to start messing about with it right away, pointing up at our pot rack and making imperious little “ah! ah!” sounds, so I gave her the little saucepan and wooden spoon she usually plays with on the floor while I work in the kitchen. She got lots of felt and wooden food throughout the morning as various gifts, plus a set of pots and ladles afterwards, so it’s very well stocked now.

And the last gift, a co-present from both sets of grandparents: the Wheely Bug. It’s the bee, not that you can tell because it’s hidden by the skirt of her lovely velvet dress. (That’s a tiny purse hooked on the antennae.)

I love this age at Christmas. Owlet kept picking up random presents from under the tree and bringing them to people with a beautiful smile. And she wanted to examine and play with everything she opened, bless her, but we had to keep going.

I think we have a picture of Sparky immersed in a book he’s just unwrapped every year, don’t we?

Sparky was very efficient without being careless, was terribly excited about everything he opened, and dashed off to put each thing in his room as it was unwrapped. His list was pretty much checked off, thanks to cooperation between parents, grandparents, and Santa. Not that it was horrendously long; we set him a limit of five items for the list, five special things he particularly wants, and we remind him that he may not get all of them. This year’s theme was Skylanders, a video game designed for kids that he was introduced to by his best friend at school. He asked for both the original game and the new release, but his grandparents co-gifted him with the original starter set, we actually found a set of original figures, and a guidebook (he adores guidebooks, and pretty much memorizes them). He was over the moon.

I think all round, it was a successful day indeed, and we are all very, very grateful for the generosity of our loved ones.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like…

No, we still have no decorations up. But the candles I am burning daily have frankincense oil in them. I have a bag of pine cones from Jan and t!, a spool of Christmas ribbon, and a glue gun; who knows what can happen. Sparky has been enjoying his Christmas playlist. And HRH and the boy are currently off selecting our tree, which will wait patiently outside till Saturday when we can put it up and decorate it. The handmade gifts are almost complete (the play kitchen HRH is building for Owlet is to die for), the previously purchased ones are all tucked away in the attic cupboard, and other than picking up gifts for a last couple of children once HRH gets paid this coming Thursday, we are just about done.

In the meantime, we had a visit to Santa:

Wow, does this slight upshot from the photographer ever make the kids look more like one another than any other photo I’ve seen, although Sparky still looks more like me and Owlet looks more like her dad. The angle of the shot rounds out Sparky’s face the way it isn’t in real life; he looks younger here. And how serious does Owlet look? She walked across the red carpet toward Santa with her arms out, but paused when she got to his chair and then wasn’t as excited to actually be with him as she’d seemed to be before she got there.

It was a new Santa at a new mall, and we are always very nervous about new places since we are so sensitive to energy, but the VERY RED redesign of the Christmas set at our previous mall of choice was so offputting that we needed another option. A friend recommended this one out here on the south shore, and we loved it. We got there just before the awesome Santa went on duty, and he was walking slowly through the mall in his long cloak with brown fur trim, sprigs of holly in his hat, saying hello to children. And the mall had the old-fashioned moving scenes inside little cottages as decorations, the way they were when I was a kid. The photo was printed right there when you left Santa, and you could choose which photo of about five you wanted done; none of this waiting an hour for development and having to go with whatever the photographer caught or decided on him/herself. We’re definitely going back next year. Hurrah!

We were actually on our way out to see Santa yesterday morning when Sparky’s old preschool/daycare director called and asked if we wanted in on a breakfast with Santa party that was starting in half an hour, as she had an extra ticket. A bunch of his old friends were going, too, so we said sure! The kids had a blast colouring and eating pancakes. The Santa was… well, he tried hard, but the suit was patched with duct tape, and the pillow in his jacket was very obvious, and his blue-tinted transition lenses weren’t standard Santa issue. But he was very jolly, and Sparky hugged him, and Owlet wasn’t scared at all. And it was marvellous to see some of the old parents we used to see when Sparky was there for two years, and to see the fresh batch of babies, and the toddlers Owlet will be pals with when she starts there next fall, who are the little brothers and sisters of kids who were there when Sparky was. The preschool alumni were running around together afterwards, and it was interesting to observe how they’ve all grown and become big six-and seven-year-olds, but you can still remember and see the little three- and four-year-olds you knew.

We had an early Christmas present this year, too:

When I got back from taking Nixie to the vet for the last time, there was a digital piano waiting for me. We inherited it from Ron’s aunt, who is destashing various things from her daughter’s childhood, and my in-laws brought it over when they came to stay with Owlet while I went out. It’s a Roland ep-7, so it’s technically a digital piano and not a keyboard. I’m actually impressed at how much more like a piano it sounds and feels like than the keyboards I’ve messed around with in the past. We’re pretty excited. Both kids love it, and both play on it often. I can even play a version of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ on it, complete with what I want to call left-hand double stops, but which are really I-III chords missing the V. It’s got surprisingly good tone for a digital, and the keys are weighted. It has 76 keys, so it’s short one octave, but I’m not complaining! We are very, very grateful.

And so we enter the final week before Christmas. I leave you with some photos of the Christmas cookies that Sparky made yesterday:


Owlet: Sixteen Months Old!

I didn’t keep notes this month, which was dumb. It means I have to try to remember stuff off the top of my head, and that never works very well when it comes to reviewing a month of child development. It also makes for a more disjointed post.

Basically everything is refining: She moves better, she speaks a bit more clearly, her actions are more focused and concise. She has figured out her straw cups, so she no longer tips them up like a regular cup to try to get at what’s inside to end up sucking air through the straw instead. She’s dropped her early morning nursing session, but she’ll often touch base after breakfast for a bit.

Owlet has used “go” for a while now. A couple of weeks ago, she learned “stop” when we were driving somewhere. So it was an enthusiastic “Go, go, go!” and a somewhat annoyed “stop” all the way home as we obeyed stop signs and traffic lights. “Thank you” is becoming clearer and is sometimes volunteered before she is reminded to say it, but most of the time we have to prompt her. She’s just at such a different verbal level than Sparky was at this age, and I have to keep reminding myself that this is more within normal parameters. I think I caught her singing the other day, but I didn’t recognize the tune or any of the words. HRH taught her how to tap her foot, and she does it in a hilarious stompy way when she hears music with a strong beat.

HRH cut down the legs of her sidecar crib-turned-changing table, and it is now a little daybed/settee for her in the living room, as we had originally envisioned. It’s wonderful: she can climb up on it with much more ease than she can the regular loveseat, and she can stand on it to look out the window.

I finally found winter boots that open far enough so that we can jam them onto her feet and actually fit the tops over her chubby calves, in a box that Debra had passed along to us. The downside to that is they also fall off her feet after a while, unless she’s walking.

Walking! Yesterday she walked the entire block from where we park the car to Sparky’s school, and she adored every second of it. We practised ‘stop’ and ‘go’ along the way: we’d stop and say, “Stop!” Then she’d wait a bit, say, “Go, go, go!” and start walking again. She’d never been into holding my hand before, preferring to clutch them close to her chest like a little squirrel as she stumps along, but yesterday she actually held one of my fingers as we strolled. It was just lovely.

The crayons were going well until the molars started really annoying her, and biting them became more interesting than colouring with them. Her right lower molar finally cut a couple of days ago, though it still has a lot of growing to do. Now the left one, stuck in a huge swollen lump on her gum, can join it at any time, thank you. For the first time, she’s got a fever in relation to teething and she has an inconsistent appetite (unless it’s yogourt, blueberries, or raspberries, or cheese, which are anytime foods). Although it’s possible that she’s actually ill, I suppose.

She has taken to wearing a plastic star-shaped cookie cutter as a bracelet. It was in a mixing bowl of random kitchen stuff I assembled for her to play with one day, and she puts it on every morning. She even insisted on wearing it out to pick Sparky up from school the other day, over her mitten and puffy snow jacket cuff.

She’s still great at understanding directions. She can push her high chair over to the table when I ask her to before lunch. She has become very interested in the animals and people from the Fisher Price sets, and likes arranging them in the Fisher Price school bus. She can identify a picture of an Angry Bird at any size, thanks to her brother’s obsession with them. She likes to pull open the drawer with the miscellaneous kitchen stuff it it and pull out measuring spoons, scoops, and cookie cutters. She also likes the drawer with all the tea towels and oven mitts in it.

She loves books, and will choose known ones over and over again. You can see her looking at each page with a little smile, recognizing everything on it. She still contributes little ‘no’s here and there, if the text has something like ‘no’ or ‘never’ on it. She said “tinkle tinkle” this morning while reading a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star board book, and supplied the “are” at the end of the phrase when I waited for her to tell me what came next. She also likes trying to put books back on the shelf… with the emphasis on trying.

She’s pretty miserable right now, with this final molar. She’s running a low fever, and is kind of listless (actually sitting down to watch TV is kind of unknown, which is what she’s doing right now; she usually buzzes around with toys and snacks and pauses now and again to watch while standing in the middle of the room). It’s the quietest she’s ever been. It’s also a bit unusual, because usually she gets crazy when she’s in pain. She is waking up crying frequently, but averaging more hours asleep than usual.

Her daily schedule looks like this these days: She wakes up between 6:30 and 7:00, has breakfast, then plays and reads books. We take Sparky to school at 8:35, then we come home for about 9:00, and she naps from about 9:30 to 11:00. When she wakes up we run errands if necessary (or if we have the energy, ahem), then have lunch between 12:00 and 12:30. After lunch we watch Sesame Street, and the afternoon nap happens from about 2:00 to 3:30. Then we go get Sparky from school. Everyone has a snack around 4:15 after we’ve unpacked, and then I try to juggle supervising Sparky’s homework, keeping Owlet occupied so she doesn’t blow a gasket or distract Sparky too much, and getting dinner going. HRH gets home around 5:00 and whisks her off to play downstairs while Sparky finishes up his homework and I do the bulk of dinner. We eat dinner at 6:00; if it is a bath night then the bath happens around 6:30 or 6:45, and she is in bed by 7:00.

She’s fun, even though she never stops moving, and that’s kind of draining. I love it when she and her brother play together; they enjoy one another’s company very much, something for which I am very thankful.