Category Archives: The Girl

Owlet: Twenty-Seven Months Old!

This is about two weeks late; I’ll backdate in in a day or so. Lots of pictures, fewer words.

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents in southern Ontario. While we were there, there was much leaf-jumping:

And we managed to get to the warplane heritage museum where my dad works before it closed for the day, despite the rain and the accident that closed both sides of the highway:


And we went to a real fall fair on a thoroughly gorgeous fall day, complete with a midway, food trucks, and livestock competitions. The kids liked the 4H rabbit jumping competitions best. (Yes, this is a real thing. Bunnies doing obstacle courses with jumps and faults, just like horse show jumping. It was marvellous, actually.) The kids got to pet all kinds of livestock, like the rabbits, and sheep, goats, ducks, cows, and horses:


Owlet’s stubbornness is starting to make things like meals and potty training a bit more of a challenge. While she is essentially pee trained (huzzah! and I only say ‘essentially’ because if stated outright that she is pee trained she will have a massive accident) pooping is another matter. She has decided to refuse to poop on the weekends, which has made things kind of crazy. (It’s not even a daycare/home thing. She’ll poop at home on weekday evenings if she has to… just not weekends. It’s driving us batty.) We can put a plate of all her favourite things in front of her and despite loving every thing on it she will push it away sharply and call for yogurt or “peanut butter toast” (which is her term for peanut butter anything, really — sandwich, crackers, actual toast). She loves yogurt, clementine oranges, raspberries, hot chocolate, and anything she can dip into milk or the aforementioned hot chocolate. She can pack away three freshly-baked scones, and would try for a fourth if we let her.

She is quirky and bursting at the seams with character. She picks up inanimate objects and uses a funny deep voice to make them say, “Heywo, Mummy; how are ooo?” She insists on smelling tins of coffee and tea when we open them, big deep inhalations with closed eyes and a sighed “ooh, mmm” afterwards. She insists on eating a pot of yogurt on her own. “My self,” she informs us importantly. And she does indeed do it herself, very tidily, and only needs parental help to scrape the very last half spoonful off the sides. If she does something, she exclaims delightedly, “I did it!” Sometimes after she has successfully used the potty, she says, “I did it!” then throws her arms around my neck and says, “Me happy, Mummy.”

She has discovered how much fun it is to chase other people. She loved pretending to be a monster at Halloween and shrieked with laughter when Sparky would pretend to run from her in horror. “I going get you! I going get you,” she would say, chugging after him on her chunky little legs.

Her favourite shows are Peppa Pig, Sesame Street extracts, and the Angry Birds Toons that Sparky watches. She loves to sing, and brought home a somewhat garbled version of Frere Jacques from preschool that I nonetheless figured out one day (hurrah for motherly intuition). She sings the same circle time song that Sparky used to sing when he attended the other preschool that the director runs, and was delighted when I started singing it with her one day. Her current favourite books are King Pig and she keeps going back to the Little Pookie books and If You Take a Mouse to School. Her new favourite movie is Finding Nemo.

The big girl bed plans continue. Our daycare director passed along an antique wooden bed that has pinecone/acorn finals on the headboard and footboard and is finished in a lovely warm chestnut brown colour. Owlet’s not in danger of climbing out of her crib (the way Sparky was, yikes), but with potty training being close to done, she needs to be able to get out of bed at night. And she so loved reading and snuggling in bed with us at Nana and Grandad’s house, and cried when we had to transfer her into the playpen she sleeps in there: “No, Mummy, no Daddy, sleep big bed!” So the plan is to put up the big bed the first weekend of December, after classes are over at the school HRH works at, so if he gets up a couple of times a night to return a wandering toddler to her bed it won’t impact him as badly the next day. I found her a lovely vintage-looking floral quilted patchwork coverlet mainly in shades of pale green and blue, which looks lovely with the yellow walls. We’re looking forward to snuggling in bed with her to read and cuddle instead of doing it in the rocker (which will have to be moved out of the room, alas, as the twin bed takes up so much more room than the crib does). Moving to a big girl bed is such a sign of growing up!

Halloween 2013

In pictures!

Owlet as Mei from Tonari no Totoro:

And Sparky as Commander Rex from Star Wars: The Clone Wars:

Sparky’s costume was made entirely by HRH out of cardboard (save for the mask, which was purchased, but ended up not being worn other than for pictures). It’s a really amazing construction of cardboard and velcro strips, Gorilla Glue and paint. Owlet’s costume was thrifted in its entirety, from three different stores. She looks even more cute with pigtails like the character wears, but since she leaves them in for about 0.78 seconds, we didn’t bother. (The crocheted Totoro was made by Ceri for Sparky’s third birthday.) While Sparky’s friends at school were appropriately cooled out by his costume, poor Owlet’s educator had no idea who Totoro was. This didn’t bother Owlet, of course; she knew who she was, and was very excited about it.

There was no way Owlet could wear her costume to actually go trick or treating, and covering it up with a snowsuit was pointless, so a few days before Halloween I brainstormed an alternate nighttime costume. She would be a snow fairy, in the pretty lavender princess-style winter coat I’d bought for her last year and stashed away, we’d find wings (thoughtfully purchased by the Preston-LeBlancs when they found a perfect and inexpensive pair on their travels), and I’d make a crown and wand out of found and dollar store materials. And that’s exactly what we did:

You can’t see it very clearly thanks to my blurry photo, but there’s a snowflake with ribbons velcroed to the centre of her wings, the same snowflake that’s wired to her dollar-store crown and her dowel-painted-silver wand. (This is pretty much the only time I’ve been pleased to see Christmas ornaments in the dollar store before Halloween. Six plastic sparkly snowflakes for a dollar? Yes please!).

It poured on Halloween, but it let up to a cold drizzle around trick or treating time. We drove out to spend the evening with HRH’s parents as usual, as their neighbourhood “does Halloween,” whereas ours pretty much does not. At this age, Sparky was scared of the spookily decorated houses and the kids in scary masks on the street, but Owlet chuckled at passing costumed people, stomped happily along the streets, and would have kept chugging along had we not called the evening on account of cold and wet and a forty-five minute drive home.

As much fun as it was, now Owlet knows what candy is, and asks for it frequently. All the way home we heard, “MORE TREATS! MORE CANDY!” from the back seat, and this after only four M&Ms on the way there, and half a Kinder Egg after supper before heading out. Now she gets one M&M after supper, and she thinks this moment is heaven. Otherwise, she’s pretty much forgotten that she collected candy in her bag, which was very very interesting while she was in the process of acquiring it.

And so another Halloween is over. I kind of miss costuming for myself. We’ll be able to do that again in, what, ten-ish years?

Owlet: Twenty-Six Months Old!

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.

Balance

Balance is what I’m trying to maintain. I have had so many ups and downs this past month or so.

About three weeks ago the car started sounding throatier. It went from ‘somewhat throaty’ to Yikes That Sounds Expensive two weeks ago when Sparky and I were coming home from the doctor. HRH dug about under the car and discovered that the flex joint that connected the exhaust system to the engine had rotted through, so I was essentially driving a car with no muffler, despite the fact that there was a lovely, healthy muffler system there. It was a fix HRH couldn’t do, so it had to go to the car doctor last Thursday morning. This was the most recent in a series of small things going wrong with the car. We paid it off this past spring, and we wanted to get through the winter with it before looking at a slightly larger car. If this pattern continued, I wasn’t going to feel comfortable trusting the car over the winter. It was ten years old, and there was nothing immediately wrong with it apart from the fact that things were starting to wear out, and constantly replacing them and not knowing how much it was going to be was stressful. We’d rather get a new-to-us car and know that a set fifty dollars a week is going to pay it off. So we started researching cars in earnest instead of idly, as we’d been doing for a few months.

I had Thursday off since my deadline had been Wednesday night, and HRH booked the day off work to take the car in to the garage. Right next door to our garage is the used car dealership that we’ve dealt with forever. And they had two SUV/crossover cars in stock that we’d been researching for the past few months. So we got to go kind-of car shopping together and take test drives! Part of me just wanted to trade the current one in right then before something else happened to decrease its value any further, and drive home in a new-to-us Saturn Vue or Dodge Journey. Well, we tested the Vue first, and we liked it so much that we only took the Journey out to confirm how much we liked the Vue. (The huge blind spots in the Journey were dreadful, and the engine just wasn’t big enough to haul the weight of the vehicle around without straining — no, thank you.) We sat down with the salesman and we discussed options and trade-in value, and we ended up deciding to buy it, doing the pre-sale paperwork right there. The Ion wouldn’t be ready before we had to leave to pick up the kids — the job was bigger than the garage had initially thought, which made us a bit anxious about the cost — so the dealership gave us a loaner car, and we agreed to pick up the new car Saturday morning.

Saturday morning came, and we took the whole family over to pick up the new car. And we discovered that the garage had comped the job on the Ion. Hadn’t we traded it in, the garage manager said? So it wasn’t our problem. Happy new car. We were completely blown away and are now trying to figure out a way to give both the dealers and the garage guy a treat to say thank you.

New car!

We took it over to Grandma and Papa’s house to show it to them and have lunch together. The next day we took it out on its first road trip, to spend the day at Upper Canada Village with t! and Jan. It was a lovely day, despite the chill and the showers and the lack of a real nap on Owlet’s part.

And another joy is that the first accelerated government payment for Owlet’s daycare tax credit came in last week. Here in Quebec we have 7$ a day subsidized daycare, and if you’re in a private non-subsidized daycare you can apply for a monthly refund for a portion of your costs, calculated using the cost of the private fees and your family income. The idea is that since the subsidized 7$/day daycare spaces are hard to come by, the government will now subsidize the cost of the private ones. Well, my refund was awfully large — larger than my fees, in fact — so I did some math and it turns out that the information the government is using is based on the cost of a full-time place, not part-time, and they’re overpaying me. So unless I wanted to get dinged at tax-time and have to pay half of this money back, I needed to do something. Well, I talked to HRH, and we decided to ask if we could send Owlet full-time, because we knew there was room, and with this monthly refund it works out to $7 a day exactly, which I can totally afford! The daycare director e-mailed me inviting me to switch Owlet to full-time just as I was sitting down to write to her, and so it’s all set: Owlet is now full-time in daycare, and everyone is thrilled, especially her. (Well, no. The lady at the deli counter in the supermarket today was disappointed that Owlet wasn’t with me. Owlet is her favourite customer, she tells me.)

I dyed Mum’s luxury yarn last week, and it looks AWESOME. It’s a stunning rust/terra cotta colour that just glows in the sunlight. I’ve never dyed so much yarn — remember, we’re talking 1700 yards, and about 13 oz of fibre! — or used so much dye at one time. It took 10 g of dye powder, when the most I’d used at one go before was 1 or 2 g, and I mixed the colour myself from two others. I hope she likes it. I have some touch-ups to do where the dye didn’t quite penetrate past figure-eight ties, and then I shall post pictures.

And a friend who is moving back to the UK has given me a pile of games, electronic equipment, books, and toys. I’m feeling particularly spoiled by life in general these days, and so very, very grateful for all our good fortune. I know we’ve been putting in our time this past year, and everything comes to those who work and wait, but the harvest — if that is the correct word, seeing as how that’s the time of year? — is so very appreciated.

Owlet: Twenty-Five Months Old!

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.

School Again

Today was Sparky’s first half-day of school. He didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t eat very much this morning, and had worried himself into a low-grade temperature and chills. We dropped Owlet off at daycare half an hour early (more on that in a moment) and drove to school, parked, and joined the throngs of parents and children walking to the schoolyard together. There were about five hundred people milling about, meeting up with friends and awaiting the morning bell that announced the arrival of the teachers with their class list posters decorated to reflect their chosen themes for the year, which they taped up on the walls of the school building so the kids could crowd around and figure out who was in which class. The boys were thrilled to find three of the four who generally hang out together were in the same class. (I feel a bit sorry for the fourth, who was missing his first day and who will be without his mates in a different class tomorrow.)

It was interesting to watch how Sparky’s body language changed over the half-hour I was with him. He started off a bit huddled into himself, holding my hand now and again. When he saw people he knew he relaxed a bit, waving and saying hi oh, so casually, though he still held himself guardedly. And when he saw his very best school friend, he called out, and I could see his body open up and relax completely. He hung around with them, laughing and talking about Minecraft, and it was as if the summer hadn’t happened at all.

His teacher seems very nice. He told me with great excitement that there’s a book on Star Wars vehicles from Episode One in the class library. (Dear Mlle Sophie: You scored a win with that one.) They did a self-evaluation exercise where they were asked to write something they’d had trouble with last year on a small card, then fold it up and hand it in. Sparky wrote ‘math: subtraction,’ which I find interesting, because I’ve never seen him have a problem with that; his difficulty in math lies in mainly in thinking through word problems. He thinks his teacher will keep the cards and bring them out near the end of the year so they can see how far they’ve come. This is the first year of Cycle Two, and they do the first half of the year in French and the second half in English. (After this, I believe it’s just about 50/50 all year long through the rest of Cycle Two and Three.)

Owlet is in her fourth week of daycare, or “cool,” as she calls it. Day one was such a success that the only way I could lure her home was by promising her a bagel. (She has recently become obsessed with fresh bagels. This is both good and bad, as we liv around the corner from a bagel bakery.) The second day I dropped her off, I hung around talking to the educator. After a minute she pointed to the stairs and said, “Shoes. Stairs, Mummy.” The message was very clear: Shoo, lady, you’re cramping my style. When I picked her up that afternoon, we got in the door at home and she started to cry, “No, play more, play….” I comforted her and told her she’d go back to “cool” again tomorrow. “Oh kay,” she said, somewhat suspiciously and grudgingly, like I might be trying to fool her. Napping has been successful, they started potty training the second week they were there because everyone had settled so well, and in general everything is going so well that it’s like she’s been doing daycare all her life. There has been a teacher switch, however, because the educator who was initially slotted to handle this small private daycare (a satellite one to the main daycare the director runs) pulled out in the second week. Fortunately, the director was already talking to someone who had worked with her before, negotiating to bring her in as a swing teacher, and she just stepped in to be full time instead. Owlet loves her, and loves all her little friends there, and it’s only a bit odd to think that she has a social life outside our sphere of responsibility now. She brings home art, and talks randomly about her friends, and in general is thoroughly in love with “cool.”

It’s terrific that school and daycare are only four minutes apart by car in the same neighbourhood. My round trip takes about fifteen minutes, including drop-offs. And it’s a relief to be able to focus on work during the day, all the more so because I’ve been working on back-to-back projects, the last couple of them rush jobs.

Twenty-Four Months Old – Happy Second Birthday, Owlet!

Two years ago, after two or three weeks of extremely frustrating prodromal labour, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning with the usual contractions, got up to walk around as always, then realized that finally, this was the real thing. Four hours later, we had a beautiful little daughter.

And then she turned one…

And now she is TWO!

She is a chipper, physical little girl who loves to climb and run and roll around. She enjoys singing, reading, colouring, playing with the wooden train set, pouring tea and making sandwiches for her toys, eating tomatoes and berries and carrots right out of the garden, and following her big brother around. She has taken to kissing things she loves, so she kissed her birthday balloons yesterday, and her pony figures before we went out shopping today, and drops random kisses on the cats when she feels like it. (I do that, too, so I can’t blame her. They are so soft, after all.) She kissed my spinning wheel goodnight for the first time tonight. I suspect this was a delaying tactic on the way to bed, rather than done out of love.

She has become fascinated with shadows over the past month. She always stops on the stairs going down to the family room and points out Mummy’s shadow, and then her own shadow. She also stops while going up the stairs to pat the new banister HRH put in, saying, “Daddy build!” (It’s a good thing she wasn’t really aware that HRH painted the stairwell the other day, otherwise there would have been a lot of washing of paint-smeared hands as she approved of his ongoing work.)

She has also become obsessed with pockets, tucking balls and wooden puzzle pieces and small toys into pockets belonging to other people. If she can’t find an actual pocket, she will tuck it into the waistband of your pants or down the front of your shirt. Sometimes when we call her, she stands up and a little cascade of tiny things fall out from under her own shirt, because she’d put them all in her own “pocket,” which means she stuffed them into the neckline of her top.

She is past thirty pounds, wears 3T tops and bottoms, size 5 disposable diapers at night, size L training pants, and size 6 to 7 shoes depending on the fit. Her curls are turning into true ringlets. HRH showed me how long her hair is when it’s wet, and it reaches down her back almost to the bottom of her shoulder blades! But curls being curls, they end up sproinging much, much shorter:

Big milestones this past month include cutting her bangs (both she and we were getting fed up with the ends in her eyes, so we trimmed them, and the curl makes them sproing up past eye level now), and turning her car seat around to face forward. I was ready to keep her facing the back — the research and safety ratings is more than convincing enough — but a friend mentioned turning their car seat around because there was a rear-facing weight limit of thirty pounds on it. Hmm, I thought, Owlet is awfully close to that; I should check, too. Lo and behold, our rear-facing weight limit was also thirty pounds, and when we weighed Owlet she was past that. So around it went, and she was very pleased indeed:

(Does anyone remember Sparky’s Calvin face, the weird twisted facial expression he’d give when you asked him to smile? Owlet has one, too. Whenever you ask her to smile, this is what she does:

We have to start telling her to look happy instead, as we did with Sparky.)

Dipping and licking are her newest food-related discoveries. She will eat through an alarming number of carrots if there is a dish of dip with them, and a small puddle of gravy on her plate sends her into a state of bliss. This also means that if you’re not paying attention, she will dip her fingers into your drink and lick them, then again and again until you catch her. I discovered this a couple of days ago when I had made myself a tea latte with vanilla syrup and frothed milk in it. HRH taught her how to eat Freezie-style juice popsicle this month, and now as soon as she sees someone with anything that remotely resembles one she says, “Lick? Lick?” Except she latches onto the popsicle and sucks it until all the flavouring is gone from the end, which isn’t exactly licking. But semantics aren’t big in a two-year-old’s world when juice pops are involved. She had blueberry iced tea from Davids Tea one day, too — the server thought she was cute, demanding sips of my little tea-of-the-day sample glasses, and he gave her a whole cup of the blueberry for free — and now she will pester me for “Tea? Tea? Ice tea? ICE TEA?”

She is currently crazy for beebugs (ladybugs) and bees (actual bees), so those are what HRH and I made to put on her birthday cupcakes:

I committed the cardinal sin of trying a new cake recipe for a birthday, which can always backfire, but I’m enshrining this one. The cupcakes were light but moist, and the flavour was great. HRH bought her a birthday balloon with ladybugs on it, too, and she was terribly excited. While shopping today I found a cup with a ladybug on it, so I picked it up for her and she was so excited at supper. (Consider that part of your birthday present to her, MLG!) Her party was lovely. We had family and godfamilies over, and my mother handled most of the food, bless her, with contributions from my mother-in-law, and the weather cooperated. We got to see people we hadn’t seen in person for ages.

As for our present to her, we were a little stumped for a while. She didn’t need anything; grandparents and godfamilies were covering little things she’d enjoy playing with, and we’re not fans of buying things for the sake of having something to give. And then I thought back to a wonderful, wonderful trip we took to Ottawa in late July, to meet two of my online friends who both had little girls who were born around when Owlet was. (They’re part of my brilliant online mums group, who all had babies due in July ’11.) Both the little girls wore amber necklaces, which are said to help soothe teething pain as well as providing other benefits (heck, I wore a large amber drop for over a year when my back was really bad just after I left retail and I was dealing with a lot of murky social interaction; it’s not like I don’t know the associated energies of the stone). There were play necklaces there, too, and Owlet had fun with those, as she doesn’t have play jewellery. So I thought that perhaps we could buy her an amber necklace. I asked her if she’d like that, and she considered it. “Like Sylvie and Audrey were wearing,” I added, and then she nodded very firmly. “Yes, please. Neckliss?” she said. So today after her nap we headed out to a local shop and looked at them. She chose a multicoloured one right away, over the lemon or cherry amber. “This! This neckliss, Mummy. For me. My neckliss.” She picked another one up and held it out to me, and said, “Mummy neckliss? Too?” I am not one to refuse amber (ever), so we found a Mummy-length one in the same multicoloured amber as hers, and we bought the two. And when we got home we both put them on and looked in the mirror together, and she was very happy indeed. She took it off for a bit, but then she asked to put it back on. She was unhappy when we said she had to take it off at bedtime (it was just a bit too long for our comfort level, and we didn’t want her chewing it), but I found a special little dish for her to put it in and we promised she could put it on again first thing in the morning. After HRH read to her I went in for my little cuddle, and she fussed at my necklace, wanting hers on again, but I took mine off and put it with her necklace, promising her that she could put it on for me when she put hers on the next day.

I had an ulterior motive for acquiescing to the matching necklaces. Tomorrow morning Owlet has her very first half-day at daycare, or “cool,” as she calls it. I wanted her to have something from me that she could see in a mirror or touch, and remember that I had one, too, and that when I touched mine or saw it I would be thinking of her as well.

She is terribly excited about “cool.” She has asked at least once a day to go for the past two weeks, sometimes going so far as to put on her hat and get her bunny and stand at the front door before asking. Her little head and shoulders would droop with disappointment when I’d tell her no, not today, there were still however many days to go until the big day. “Oh,” she would say, her little voice echoing with the pathos of crushed hopes and dreams. But tomorrow is the big day at last, and I was excited as I packed her bag tonight. I’m a little worried about the nap issue, but we won’t address that till Wednesday since they’re only doing the half-day tomorrow. She’s attending part-time, and normally she’d go on Tuesday, but she has a doctor’s appointment that day and so she’s going tomorrow as an exception.

Recently she’s had some hard nights. Her two-year-old molars are doing their thing, and sometimes it’s just difficult to fall asleep. The other night I was in her room cuddling her, and then I stood up to put her back in bed. She clasped her arms around my neck and swayed back and forth, mumbling something as she did. It took me a moment to understand her. She was saying, “I love you and love you; and love you and love you; and love you and love you.” It’s from the end of Night-Night, Little Pookie by Sandra Boynton, and it just about made my heart explode. I teared up as I kissed her curls, and I whispered, “I love you and love you, too.”

Because who can’t love this character?

(Dramatic? Nah.)