There’s lots of fun stuff going on. Owlet’s play has become increasingly imaginative, and her language skills have ratcheted up another couple of notches. She uses “I” and “me” correctly, and rarely refers to herself in the third person by her name anymore.

Zippers are big right now. If her jacket or sweater has a zipper, it has to be done up, and done up all the way to her chin. She gets fixated on some things, like wearing rainboots instead of shoes, and can’t get past them. Most of the time she’s such a cheerful little thing that the issues she gets fixated about seem much worse in comparison. Sometimes she just gets stuck in a crying jag, and if you ask her why she’s crying, she says, “I — don’t — know,” with big huffs and gulps of breath. It’s a way of decompressing about all the little things that have been piling up; a quick burst of crying and everything’s okay again.

Two of her schoolmates have recently acquired baby brothers, and there is a lot of play centering around caring for baby dolls going on at daycare. It’s happening at home, too. “I carry Hop-Hop like a baby. Baby’s crying. Baby Zack can’t ask for milk, so he cries.” Baby Zack, who made a kind of show-and-tell appearance at daycare, has very small toes on very small feets, I am told. And sometimes she likes to pretend she’s a baby, too. “Carry me like a baby!” Well, kiddo, that’s a lovely thought, but you’re over 36 pounds and a metre tall, and that makes for a lot of baby. Particularly when you’re trying to maneuver your way through a doorway on the way to bed.

Chocolate frappés are her newest snacktime obsession. We call them chocolate milkshakes because it’s easier, and make them by blending ice cubes, milk, and a spoonful of cocoa powder and a bit of sugar. They are terrific treats because (a) they come with straws, and (b) you can dip cookies into them.

With the change in weather, we are spending lots more time outside, which she’s thrilled about. She can putter around as much as she likes, watering all the rocks she can find. Yes, she’s still fascinated by rocks. She picks up ones that are warm from the sun and waters them with her little watering can, then sets them along the edge of the steps to the back deck or next to plants. She trundles back and forth from the window wells along the side of the house, picking up the river stones that fill them, and carrying them out to her playhouse in the back garden. She had a whole collection on the back windowsill, and has started a rock garden beside the door.

She has also been working hard to master the slide of the play structure in the backyard. The one at daycare has a gentler angle. Ours has a more vertical grade, so she flies down it and usually shoots off the end and lands on her bottom with a thud, which results in crying and frustration. Someone had to hold her hand for a few days while she worked on it, and now she’s just about able to get her legs in the right position to turn the finish into a jump, and then land on her feet. She’s using a regular swing at daycare, too, which means we need to replace her wooden baby-seat swing with a new big-kid one. (Actually, we need two new big-kid ones, because the one we took off to make room for the wooden baby swing is broken, and the one Sparky uses is also cracking.) She got her own little pool this past weekend, too, because the big one HRH’s parents bought for the kids is too deep for her. “I getting my own pool,” she said, looking at the big one, “because this one too enormous.” So we set them up side by side, and each of them is perfectly happy to run around and splash in their own pool, tossing balls back and forth between them.

Choosing music in the car in the morning (for the five-minute drive) is very important to her. “I choose… owls!” she’ll say with excitement, wanting to hear the score from Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole. “I choose Merida! Frozen! Flufflies! (That would be “Fireflys” by Owl City.) She loves the idea of playlists. “I love playlist!” she exclaims happily when we put one on and she recognizes all the songs in it. (Remember when she used to say “Thank you!” every time the next song in the playlist I’d made for her came on, like I’d just that moment looked through my music for a song because she liked it?) The kids are working out turns. Even if Sparky doesn’t want to listen to anything in particular, if it’s his turn, he insists on not letting Owlet choose.

One day last week I was sitting in the living room with my tea. Most of the time I have a granola bar for breakfast, but I’ve stopped doing it before I take the kids to school, because they pester me for bites and I end up eating less than half of it. On this particular day Owlet noticed that all I had in my hands was my cup of tea. “Mummy!” she said brightly. “Mummy, I get a granola bar for you!” Off she trotted to the pantry, looking over her shoulder, saying, “Okay, Mummy? Granola bar? For you?” I had to laugh. It was so clearly a ploy to get herself half of the granola bar, disguised as concern and care for my morning snack. We saw right through it, but it was such an amusing example of toddler cunning. She tucks me into her bed after I’ve read her bedtime stories, too, nestling Hop-Hop into the crook of my arm, pulling the covers up to our chins, and kissing us both. “Close your eyes,” she orders, then slips off the bed and goes to get HRH. “Mummy’s sleeping,” she says, “not wake her up.” Again, it’s adorable toddler cunning – if Mummy’s sleeping there, then I can’t go to bed! – but really, I just enjoy the minute of lying quietly while they say goodnight to Sparky and the cats.

She’s working hard on the concept of fear. “Hop-Hop is scared,” she says sometimes. Sometimes it’s because she’s displacing, sometimes it’s because she’s pretending the bunny is afraid of whatever they’re watching or reading together. She has a sudden terror of ants, for some reason; she calls them spiders and panics, despite no one modeling panicked behaviour about either ants or spiders, at home or daycare. And yet she turns over rocks with her brother and looks at the millipedes and roly-polys. There was a poor bumblebee on the unistone path last week, its wings shredded; I have no idea what had happened, but it was in bad shape. The kids crouched next to it, fascinated, for ages. I had to drag them into the house.

These days she’s very into Peter Rabbit (finally, after refusing to read Beatrix Potter books forever) and Paddington Bear. She got her first library card last weekend and was a blur when she got to her section. She ended up bringing home two Henry and Mudge books, which is awesome because we have a pile of books in that series, but not the two she chose. We moved that pile to her room from Sparky’s, to her excitement and Sparky’s begrudgment. (Never mind that he hasn’t read them in years; it’s the principle of the thing.)

At the house next to the home daycare we go to, there’s a concrete lion at the end of the driveway and a big rock in front of the garden. Every morning, Owlet stops and says hello to each them. We have been working very hard on not walking onto the lawn to give them hugs and kisses. Winter helped, because they were covered in snow, but now the temptation is again there. So she carefully lines the toes of her rainboots up along the edge of the sidewalk, getting as close as she can, leans over and talks to the lion, then moves over and does the same to the rock. The rock is about two feet tall and maybe eighteen inches wide. The other morning, she said there was a baby chicken inside. It took me a minute or two before I understood that she meant it was vaguely egg-shaped. Then no, she said; there was a dragon inside. Okay, so now it’s a dragon egg; sure, why not? That’s a great pretend. Then: “No. Issa rabbit. There’s a baby rabbit inside. Bye, rock and baby rabbit! See you this afternoon!”

So now you know where baby rabbits come from. They hatch from huge rocks. Or they do in our bright and beautiful little girl’s imagination, at least.

Same old. Child grows, gets cuter. Converses more articulately. Does adorable stuff. Gets pathetically ill. Bounces back. You know.

You want pictures.

We spent Easter with my parents in Ontario. Owlet’s choice of reading material on the trip will, no doubt, be approved by many of you.

The weather was glorious, and the kids played outside with chalk on the sidewalk. Then we moved into the backyard so Sparky could climb the cherry tree, as he does at least once every visit, and Owlet decided that the backyard stone bunny needed some Eastery chalk decoration, too.

Travelling was great on the way there, but on the way home we ran into a toddler difficulty. Every time we stopped and went into a public bathroom, Owlet said she didn’t need to pee. She would try but couldn’t; the big public bathrooms were, I think, too busy and noisy, with all the flushing and lots of doors slamming and those wretched hand dryer machines that sound like a jet engine taking off and still make even Sparky cringe. We even carried our own toddler potty, because she’s been working through big potty/small potty comfort issues, and we didn’t want to stress her out with that any more than the trip was already going to stress her. So she wouldn’t go, we’d leave, then she would randomly say “Peepee! Hafa go pee!” with great urgency while we were on the highway. So we’d pull over, set her up on the little potty in the back of the car, and we’d wait; she still wouldn’t pee, and we’d pack up and go again. I’d forgotten how stressful travelling with a relatively newly potty-trained child is. (She eventually peed about two hours from home, in one of those lovely big private family bathrooms that are also the wheelchair-accessible rooms. So now we know: wait for the family bathroom, even if it means a longer stop, because the big public bathrooms are just too much for her. It wasn’t as much of an issue on the way down because we’d managed to use the private family bathroom every time except once, and the public bathroom was surprisingly quiet for that one.)

This month, Owlet decided that she wanted to learn how to knit. She grabbed my ballwinder one morning and said, “I love knitting!” She cranked it for a while, then said, “Where is my knitting? Oh, there it is!” I wasn’t about to give her my blanket square in progress, so I popped upstairs and got her two fat DPNs and the tiny ball of deep purple I had left over from a different blanket square.

“My knitting!” she said importantly.

Apparently, knitting consists of carefully wrapping the yarn around and around a needle (which isn’t entirely wrong, just missing a couple of details). And despite me trying to keep the ball of yarn on her lap, she insisted on dropping it over the side of the chair, probably because I put my project bags on the ground to the right of my feet so the yarn travels straight up to my right hand without getting caught on anything. (Frankly, if she was imitating me, I was surprised she didn’t say ”I’m COUNTING!” whenever I spoke to her.)

She has been sick twice in the past month, the first one a cold that had her home for three days, the most recent one a high fever coupled with a brutally sore throat that had me worried about strep until I heard that it had gone through the other daycare and lasted about four days. Every kid in our daycare caught it, too, except for one little girl who missed the two infectious days.

I forgot to post these two a couple of months ago. Who knew we had a little girl old enough to have hair this long? Here’s proof that curls take up more length of hair than you might think:

Braids are fun when you shake your had back and forth and feel them bump on your back and neck. Action shot!

She is off potatoes for some reason (why? who knows?), still hopes for “graby” if there’s meat involved in supper, loves to eat handfuls of frozen peas if I’m about to cook them for supper, loves raw sweet peppers, adores granola bars, and is going to be one sad little owlie when she finishes the last of her Easter chocolate. Every night after supper she says “Little bunny!” or “Chocclit egg!” with great excitement. Handing her a small foil-wrapped egg is good for a few minutes of peace, because she peels it all off in tiny flakes.

Adorable conversational quirks these days include saying, “Oh, man” when she’s unimpressed or sulky about something (thanks so much for modelling that one, Sparky), and the much more enjoyable “I love this one!”, or some other version of “I love {insert thing she’s doing/watching/hearing here}.”

You know what she loves doing? Playing on the iPad with Sparky. Actually, doing anything with Sparky, because he is awesome. (And he is. She’s right about that.)

And the willow tree that we planted outside her window when she was about six months old. She loves her tree.

We’re on track for reading! Owlet loves books, and lately she has started touching words or making us run our fingers under the sentences when we read aloud to her. Then she tries to do the same thing. This means she knows that what you say changes as you move from word to word, which is so exciting. It’s also exciting that if you ask her to find two of the same word on a page, she can do it, which means she’s recognizing patterns and word shapes.

The child gates are now all gone (yaaaay! our shins are so grateful!) except the one to the stairs leading to the office. Even that one we leave closed but unlatched a lot of the time, so it’s mostly a visual reminder that she’s not supposed to go up there. Occasionally if she’s alone for whatever reason, she takes it into her head to pull it open, climb the stairs, and play the piano, which is always amusing. (And yes, it is still a “pinnannose.”)

She loves playing with her new build-a-bug app on the iPad, and she’s getting better at the matching games, too. She was very into The Princess and the Frog for a while, including the music, even though she kept saying she was scared of the shadows in it. We think she was working through fear/discomfort by desensitizing herself to it and play-acting through all the stages of “I scared!” and “shadows can’t hurt me.” Now, of course, everything is all Frozen, all the time. Nana bought a copy for them and brought it with her when she visited a couple of weeks ago, and the children were over the moon.

Her favourite books are a little less clear; she cycles through her bookshelf pretty regularly these days. We read Are You My Mother? frequently, she’s been enjoying Chester and the Scaredy Squirrel series by Melanie Watt an awful lot. She likes magazines because they have lots of different pictures in them, preferably her brother’s copies of Chickadee. She loves choosing a book to bring in the car in the mornings. And one day she insisted on bringing her chosen book into the daycare, even though I told her she’d have to share it with the other children. She actually got excited about that, and was pleased to pass it around and talk about the baby animal pictures in it.

She’s suddenly into puzzles. She’s past the wooden ones with the lift-out basic shapes, so we cleared most of them out and sent them to the daycare along with some other toys she’d grown out of, which pleased everyone; they had fun with their new puzzles and she was happy that she’d shared them. She’s now into the 24-piece cardboard ones, and is pretty good at them, so long as one of us turns the pieces the right way up and makes sure they’re sort of in the right general order. She’s learning to look for pieces that have the colours of a certain character on it and put them together first. She really doesn’t understand the concept of lining up the straight edges of the border yet, though.

The best new game of pretend is “ocean.” She spreads the blue afghan out on her floor, pulls the old baby bath out from under her bed (where it holds random stuffed animals and toys), climbs in, and pretends she’s in a boat. It is best played with Sparky, who can rock it, and they “dive” into the “water” and swim around, or catch fish, or pile any water-related toys they have into the boat with them (like stuffed turtles, fish, puffins, and so forth). It’s a great game. The two of them are working out their relationship; he thinks and imagines so much more quickly than she does, and in general she’s willing to enthusiastically follow him. But she’s starting to suggest her own variations of what they’re doing, and Sparky is having trouble being flexible; if what she imagines doesn’t fit in with his vision, or alters something he’s already proposed, then he gets cross with her. We’ve been doing a lot of refereeing, reminding them to share the imagining and take turns suggesting the next development.

She is so ready for winter to be done with. She has been pulling her rainboots out of the cupboard and tromping around the house in them. It’s warm enough that she can wear a spring jacket to daycare in the mornings for the quick jump between the car and the building, but not warm enough to wear only that (plus splash pants) to play in. So we’ve been toting two complete outfits to school each day, her spring one and her winter one.

She loves, loves, loves painting and coloring. She enjoys tracing things like cups and hands (including Hop-Hop’s paw). She still directs people to draw things for her instead of scribbling herself, though. Stickers are still the best things ever, but she gets whiny about which ones she has to be using. We are forever peeling stickers off the floor, chairs, windowsills, doors, and our arms (we even find them in the dryer exhaust screen). Fortunately they’re easily removed, and don’t leave adhesive behind.

Among her current favourite foods are ‘rolly cheese’ (her term for a slice of processed American cheese, the kind we use for special grilled cheese sandwiches, because it’s flat and she likes to have it rolled up), carrots (because she can share them with Solstice), peanut butter toast, ‘graby’ (her term for gravy, which is also what she calls maple syrup), peas (preferably frozen, and preferably while she is pouring them into the dish before microwaving them). She is totally off potatoes, for some reason. All meat is awesome if it comes with ‘graby’ to dip it in.

She’s mostly in size 4; we’ve given up on size 2 and 3, because they’re generally too small. I have no idea what size her feet are; her rainboots are size 7, but her snowboots are size 9, and it’s been forever since she wore a shoe. She has recently asked for an umbrella, and as they’re going to be doing umbrella-related activities later this month at daycare, then I’ll have to pick one up for her. She has decided she would like fairies or Hello Kitty on it.

She loves helping with the dishes. Her job is drying them, although she needs to be reminded each time to put them on the counter instead of dropping them back into the dirty water. She’s gotten much better at sitting still while we put her hair in ponytails, although leaving them in is still not guaranteed. She’s always moving, always imagining, and always loving. She’s fun to have around.