Category Archives: The Girl

Owlet: Twenty-Three Months Old!

This is it. We are in less-than-a-month countdown mode to the second birthday, now.

Lots more talking (what, in this family?), lots more running. Climbing has been the big skill expansion this past month. Owlet nows goes up and down stairs by stepping on them instead of crawling. And she decided to climb up the inclined climbing wall on the play structure to get to the little fort and go down the slide all on her own last week.

Potty training is happening, and sometimes it’s going really well, and then sometimes there are days where she kicks and screams if you even mention the potty. And then kicks and screams if you change her diaper. So, you know. She’s just about two and perfectly normal.

Owlet is fighting a nasty cold, and today I finally took her temperature because she felt really hot to the touch when she woke up. Sure enough, she had a mid-grade fever, so I gave her some Tylenol, which mitigated a bit of the whingey whininess that’s been our near-constant companion these past few days. She’s off her feed, too, which tells us that’s she really feeling poorly more than anything else. (That and waking up crying, which she never does; she usually wakes up and talks to herself for about half an hour, playing with her blankets and stuffed animals, before cheerfully calling for company.)

This past month Owlet finally clicked into make-believe. She was on all fours one morning, reaching for some bulky yarn I’d cut lengths of so the kids could play with the cats. “Are you a kitten?” I said as I walked by. “Are you pretending you’re a cat?” “Maow, maow,” she said, delighted, and swiped at the yarn like she sees the cats do. Then later she was crouching down with her hands on the floor, being obdurate about something, and I said, “Are you a frog?” She looked at me for a moment, then beamed and said, “Fog! Reh… BEET!” And we hopped down the hall together, taking turns to jump and say “Reh… BEET!” (or, in my case, “ribbit”) when we landed. It was the only way I could get her into her room for her nap. (That’s how miserable this cold is making her. When I say it’s nap time, she usually shouts “NIGH-NIGH!” and runs for her room.) This is so much fun. I don’t remember having to teach Sparky how to play pretend. He just kind of did it on his own first.

In getting Owlet’s room ready for her nap another day, I discovered my niddy-noddy in her crib. This is:

(a) evidence that I don’t watch her closely enough while she plays;
(b) an example of how I leave potentially dangerous equipment lying around;
(c) proof that I’m indoctrinating my child into the love of fibre arts successfully.

(I should point out that I don’t actually consider the niddy to be dangerous equipment. I imagine that people unfamiliar with how my house runs might, though. It might be like seeing a toddler running around with a baseball bat, or some other kind of long piece of wood. But we don’t keep anything breakable down at Owlet-level, and even if she swings it she might knock a picture off the hall table, but that would be about the extent of the damage. I also imagine that she could theoretically ding herself in the face with one of the crosspieces, but she’d have to be moving really fast and swinging the niddy at the same time. I suppose it could be considered mildly dangerous when she pretends it’s a pony and tries to ride it around the house, and trips over the crosspiece between her feet. But that doesn’t fuss her, so it doesn’t fuss me, either.)

Owlet is now enthusiastically into reading along. Her favourite books at the moment are Mo Willem’s Pigeon books, Sandy Boynton’s Little Pookie books, and Ellen Walsh’s Mouse Paint. She provides Little Pookie’s lines of dialogue when we read those books, and it’s hilarious to hear her tiny voice say, “Um… a what?” in Let’s Dance, Little Pookie, or “No, no, nope, no THANK YOU!” in What’s Wrong, Little Pookie? While she gets the “silly!” part about the hippo borrowing the shoes, she just snores at the five lazy frogs instead of saying “silly, too!” And then she pretends to grab one of the cookies on the next page and runs off to feed it to HRH, Sparky, the cats, and whoever else she can think of. So the rest of that book doesn’t really happen for us yet.

This month she also learned how to blow bubbles with a bubble wand (or kind of; she does a short, sharp puff of air, which, if it’s directed correctly, produces one or two tiny bubbles). HRH built the kids a sandbox to stop her from digging in the vegetable garden, and Owlet supervised.

It’s a big hit. Owlet approved on the first day that there was sand in it and it was nice enough to play outdoors.

It’s summer hols now, and I am loving how the kids play together. They cook up games about playing with the cats by dragging yarn for them to chase, each of them going in opposite directions as they trot around the middle of the house. They make blanket forts downstairs on weekend or rainy mornings while they watch TV. They build block towers together, and roll balls to knock them down. There’s still frustration on Sparky’s part as Owlet jumps the gun and cuts short his planned outcome of whatever he’s doing, but that’s part of working things out between themselves.

She loved the daycare get-to-know-you picnic and played with all the things. (Chewing on the play kitchen food is probably what gave her this awful cold, but it has to happen at some point.) She enjoyed playing with the other kids, too (parallel play at this point, of course, but she was very cheerful about it), and singing songs, and doing the casual group activities. We’re in a countdown for that, too; she starts part-time daycare the week she turns two, though it will be a progressive entry and she probably won’t do full days till the following week. She’s such a big girl now, learning so much, and I know she’ll love the stimulation of daycare and socializing with other girls her age.

Owlet:Twenty-Two Months Old!

Real conversations are what are making us stop and think about how far we’ve come these days. “No milk, thank you. Outside, please? Outside?” Owlet says when we offer her a drink. She is starting to do that singsong “reading along” thing when we read her stories, and wordless “singing along” with music in the car, shaping the sounds of the lyrics without actually saying the precise words themselves. “Tight,” she reminds me when I unbuckle her from her seat in the car, squeezing her stuffed rabbit in her arms, promising me that she’ll not drop it or lose with while we’re out. “Squeeeeeeeze!” she says suddenly when she’s sitting on my lap to get her shoes on, catching my arms and pulling them around her so I can give her a hug.

This month produced the first unprompted “I love you, Mummy” (and only the second time she’d said it ever). One weekend morning, she wandered up to me and leaned her head on my knee (not easy, as I was cross-legged on the settee so she had to bend at the waist to get to the proper level) and said, “I love you, Mummy.” Then she stood up and wandered off again. HRH looked at me and said, “And if anything was wrong, all is now forgiven!”

She had her first visit to a farm when we spent Victoria Day weekend with my parents. Here is a summary of the day:

    PONIES ARE AWESOME.
    No, wait; TRACTORS ARE AWESOME.
    Why are we leaving the farm? Why are you taking me away from my FAVOURITEST THINGS EVER?

In other words, it was an enormous success. There were three vintage and antique tractors that she could climb on, and she had great fun doing that. She went for a tractor-drawn wagon ride around the farm, and we saw turkeys, rabbits, chickens, and goats. “Goats! Goats!” she kept telling people. She even took the farmer’s hand and tried to get him to come over to see the goats, as if he was unfamiliar with his own livestock. While we were there, Sparky rode a pony for the first time, and she was fascinated. She had to think about it for a bit and watch other people before asking, “Poheys? Poheys? Neigh neigh?” So we gave her a ride, too, and she sat there very proudly while being led around the paddock. At the third corner, she looked at the spectators and said very primly, “Yeehaw.” She just about killed everyone.

While we were visiting my parents, Owlet also had her first real large playground experience. (Because I keep my kids locked up, you know. Actually, there just aren’t very many around us.) She’s at a great age to watch the other kids and figure out what to do that way. She had some fun with the swings, seriously considered the climbing wall, and entertained herself by picking up handfuls of the hot, fine sand and dumping them into my hands, until she decided that pouring it into my shoes was more fun. She did the small slide a couple of times with her Granddad helping her, then decided she wanted to do the big slide, thank you very much. So I got her up there through the climbing structure while Granddad waited at the bottom. Except she’s not heavy enough to keep up her momentum, and she stopped halfway down! In the end she compromised on the curved slide with Sparky, and had a wonderful time. Appropriately, when it was time to go, we told her she could go down the slide “once more for the Queen,” as it was Victoria Day. After that we went down to the lakeside and sat on the rocks, throwing stones into the breakers of Lake Ontario. This was the best thing ever. (Tractors? What tractors? There are rocks here. And water.)

She really enjoyed her hour exploring the new daycare last week. She was a little unsure of the toys that made noise – I think we have all of one toy that makes noise when you press buttons, and it is mercifully very quiet – but she was very interested in all the different play stations, and already has her own little hook and cubby with her name on them, all ready for when it opens at the beginning of August.

She loves exploring her environment. Dandelions were her biggest thing this past month. She picked them on walks, and on the way to meet Sparky after school, carrying handfuls of them and trying to blow dandelion clocks. Or rather, we’re working on actually blowing on them instead of snorting them too close to the nose and ending up with a sputtering toddler. We had some terrific rainstorms this past month, too, and she became fascinated by puddles, particularly in combination with her beloved sticks, rocks, and pinecones, stirring them up or dropping them in to see what happens. HRH built a proper sandbox this past weekend, because Owlet plunked herself in the garden and started piling dirt on her legs one day. We put veggies in the garden right after that, so the sandbox will hopefully redirect her enthusiastic digging efforts.

She just invented a little game that she finds hilarious. You have to sit on her bench by the window at one end of the bookcase while she wedges herself into the corner between the wall and the other end of the bookcase and clears her throat. Then you count aloud, “One, two, THREE!” and both of you pop out to look at one another around the bookcase, and she giggles wildly. Then she sobers, looks at you seriously, holds up a finger or two, and says, “Times?” which means, “Can we do this again?”

All of us are having fun with her. She’s of an age where she can romp with Sparky now, who isn’t exactly the most dexterous of kids at the best of times, so sometimes he accidentally bounces her off corners or furniture because they’re going too fast or cut a corner too closely. But they play together with various toys and pillows, and hug one another, and share books, too. It’s so much fun to see them together.

Fibro: The Next Step

As of today, I am officially back on the medication for my fibro. I’ve been off it for about five years now, having stopped taking it after a year so we could try for another baby. (When it looked like that was a strike-out I went back to the doctor and said, “I cannot deal with the pain and physical fatigue any more, and it looks like the second baby isn’t going to happen, so I need to start taking it again even though I don’t want to.” I took it for three weeks and then ta-da, baby conceived, so I stopped again; it didn’t even really get properly underway that time.)

Somewhat ironically, over the past couple of days I’ve felt the best I have in about three months. But my appointment with the doctor was scheduled for today, so in I drove through stupid traffic (an accident on the highway meant I was late and Owlet was fit to be tied after being stuck in the car for an hour and twenty minutes). And it went like this:

    Me: So these are my symptoms. I think the fibro is making a comeback.

    Dr: Good grief, if it’s this bad, why didn’t you come to me sooner? It’s a chronic illness. How much Tylenol are you taking a day? And periods of using melatonin to knock yourself out and sleep deeply enough?

    Me: Um.

    Dr: It seems silly to suffer when we have a therapy that worked in the past, doesn’t it?

    Me: Well, um… yes? I guess I’m just… stubborn? About taking medication and… other things like admitting it’s bad enough that I need to do something?

    Dr: Well, let’s move past that and improve your life quality again, shall we? You’ll feel a lot better on several levels, including mood and outlook above and beyond the physical benefits of less pain and fatigue both muscular and mental, and you can stop beating yourself up.

I am so, so thankful that my new GP is just as supportive and open-minded as my old one. And apparently also knows me really well already. Heh.

This afternoon, Owlet and I have an appointment at her new daycare. It turns out it’s starting operations in two months, so she’ll be starting there the first week of August. I’m excited for her; I know she’ll love it. And it overlaps with a week or so of Sparky’s summer day camp, so he and I will be able to have a couple of hours in the afternoon together alone, which I know he’ll appreciate. We do have some work to do first, though; toilet training needs to formally start this summer, as does Operation Phase Out the Soother.

I owe the blog a post on my spinning and dyeing. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week. My swap partner seems to love the package I sent her, which had some lovely dyed fibre in it, so I’ll show that off, too.

Quiet

I’m being very quiet these days, because I’m exhausted.

I remember this. It’s what the beginning of fibro felt like. The kind of zoning out, the physical exhaustion, the inability to hold a thought in my head past a certain period of time. I’m irritable as a result of all of this. I have a constant low-grade headache, and my body is starting to hurt again. I’m not sure how to relax, because a lot of my time is just spent sitting there, trying to interact with my children or fold laundry, and not getting very far. I’ve forgotten how to enjoy myself again, because it’s kind of a weary triumph when I just get through doing the regular stuff. I wonder if I need to try to start the “yay me I accomplished these things today” posts again. It would serve to get me journaling more often, and to show me that I am accomplishing things, even when it doesn’t feel like it. I need to consciously start implementing my fibro-coping mechanisms again, starting with my expectations and limits for my daily activity.

I’ve had time off from work, thank goodness. After a crazy few months, I’ve had a couple of weeks of evenings and naps to myself, and I’m so grateful. I don’t know how I’d handle it otherwise.

I’m reading a bit every day, which is nice. I’m almost finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s new River of Stars, and as usual, I don’t know how I feel about it. Kay has vaguely frustrated me a bit over the past few books for reasons I can’t pinpoint, and every time I read one I decide it will be my last… then every time I read an excerpt of the next one and the poetic prose just sucks me in. I disliked the Sarantine Mosaic duology when it came out, but now I think it’s my favourite of all his works. Funny how one’s opinions change.

I’m sending a box of handmade projects to a swap partner from my mums’ group today, and working on that has been lovely. I can’t say any more than that until she’s received it, but I pushed some of my boundaries and skills making the items, and explored new techniques, and I’m pleased with it. Even with the last-minute wibbling about one project, redoing it, and deciding in the end to send the first version after all.

I finally got around to making an appointment to drop in at the local spinning and weaving studio that’s been open for over two years, and it was glorious. Oh my goodness, I will never have to shop online again! There were shelves and shelves of silks, cottons, flax, wools of all sorts, and luxury fibres like yak, camel, and alpaca, which I’d never touched on their own, only as blends. She has two full-size floor looms set up, six wheels, and lots of swifts and rigid heddle looms and carders all over the place. There were cones and cones of cones of weaving yarn, dyes, spindles… I wanted to move in. I could have easily spent so much more than I did. She was so patient with Owlet, too, who wanted to touch all the things. Especially the packets of ginned and dyed cotton that she kept picking up and squishing, saying “skish, skish,” and the huge skeins of handspun she picked up and cuddled, saying “soft, soft.”

We actually had to go two days in a row, because I’d forgotten to take money out of the bank to pay for my order the first day, so we went back. Owlet stopped at every dandelion plant along the sidewalk and yanked off the flower tops, then gave them all to the woman who runs the studio. And she told me she hosts a spin-in once a month on a Sunday, and invited me! Unfortunately, the next one isn on a group cello class day, so I’ll have to wait for the next one.

Owlet is great, Sparky is great (he has a school concert tomorrow afternoon, and I hope everything works out; HRH’s parents are coming to stay with Owlet so I can attend, and then I think there should be a Mama-Sparky treat afterward), I have a new-to-me spinning upright wheel that was a crazy good deal (thank you, enormous tax refund allowing me to give myself a little treat amid paying debts) and HRH has a new-to-him iPhone that we’re trying to set up (ditto the treat, but grr, technology and things not talking to other things). We are a single-cat household for the first time in… well, ever, actually, since I had to take Cricket in to the vet to be euthanised two weeks ago. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and you could almost see through her; it was just time.

That’s about it. Trudging along.

Owlet: Twenty-One Months Old!

Now that the weather’s nice, we get multiple requests for “Ousside? Ousside?” each day. When we are ousside, she mucks about in the dirt of the garden, inspects every flower (or “flowerfly,” if you are Owlet), giggles on the swing till she hiccoughs, picks up rocks and carries them to new places, and picks up as many sticks as she can till her hands are full. And then she stands and stares at the ones in her hands, wondering what to do with them, because there’s another stick on the ground, right there, and if she lets go of the bouquet of sticks with one hand to reach for it the ones she’s holding will fall, and that will be a crisis of unimaginable proportion.

She adores pine cones, dandelions, standing on manhole covers and crouching down to poke her fingers in the grooves and holes, and stopping to talk to random people on the sidewalk. One of her latest obsessions is the small bell tower around the corner. We can see it from our back porch, as a matter of fact. Every day as we pull into the driveway she asks two things: “Flowerflies?” If I tell her no, we can’t spend half an hour in the front garden examining every single flower that is currently in bloom, she asks, “Bayels?” We walked once to the church to look at the bells, and now she asks to do it several times a day. Most of the time it’s a nice way to kill twenty minutes, especially in the early morning after we’re back from dropping Sparky off at school, but sometimes I have stuff to do, and it’s not a convenient time.

She is also currently enthralled with bugs of all kinds. She is especially fond of bees; bee-bugs (which are ladybugs); fufferfies (we get this one mixed up with flowerflies a lot, to her frustration); and nails (snails: she pointed at the spiral in Ceri’s seal tattoo the other day and informed her that there was a snail in it). We have recently managed to get her to understand that the buzzing sound in the sky is not a bee, but a plane. Mushrooms, tomatoes, and cucumber are the best snacks ever. Unless there are goldfish crackers in the house. Then all bets are off.

New words are too numerous to keep track of any more. Monster, snail, loom, sit, sauce, pizza, dip, snack, bite (“Bite?” she says hopefully when she sees you eating something, and she offers you bites of whatever she is eating, too… also to the cat, whether he is there or not), diaper, people, sure (it is hilarious to ask her if she wants something and to hear a laid-back “Shuuuure!” in reply), and phrases like “here you go” chirped every time she puts something down by you. About six weeks ago she started calling me Mummy instead of Mama, and it’s rarely once at a time; it’s usually Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. Today I asked her, “Do you want to help me?” “Help you? Shuuuure!” she said. That’s huge, being able to turn the pronoun around from “me” to “you” and use it correctly like that.

She wakes up around 6:30, has lunch around 11:30, and has a nap from roughly noon till 2:00. Then we go get Sparky at school for 3:45, have supper around 6:00, and she’s in bed by 7:00. When she wakes up from naps she calls for Gryff (“Maow! Maow!”) and I open the door for him. He runs in and they get all excited, because the next thing I do is lift the cat into the crib, and the two of them lie there and talk to one another. Owlet covers him with blankets, asks me for some books and reads to him, or just lies down and cuddles with him until he’s had enough. It’s really sweet. The two of them play an odd game of Marco Polo in the house, too. If Gryff is somewhere and meows, Owlet will meow back, and the Gryff will reply, and they’ll carry on like that for a while.

We cut out the bottle or cup before her nap entirely; now it’s just snuggling with the soother till she’s asleep, which is usually in about five minutes, and then I slip her into the crib. (We do the opposite at bedtime: a couple of ounces of milk still, then into bed awake, although we need to switch that milk over to a cup of water now). Over this summer we need to start weaning her off the soother before naps, because she won’t have it at daycare.

She’s still incredibly social. When we drive to or from school, she waves to bus drivers (“Hello, peoples!”), and blows kisses to the drivers around us as we pull away from red lights. She’s cheerful, likes to make sure everyone gets hugs and kisses when people leave (family hugs are particularly important before Daddy goes to work in the morning), and shares everything with everyone, but expects the same in return. (You weren’t going to eat half that bowl of pasta, were you? Or that scone? Or drink that cup of tea?).

Racing

Life continues tumbling pell-mell along.

The concert was lovely. It went better than it should have for me, considering that I have zero time in which to practice. We had a huge house, probably due to the fact that our conductor was our oboe soloist for the opening concerto, and we also played one of his original compositions that hasn’t been played locally (either ever, or in a long time). Lots of friends showed up to share the evening, which was lovely, too. I do wish that my intonation wouldn’t go out the window after intermission, though. I sit on the outside of our section, which means right next to the audience, and I hate that those people can hear precisely how off I get in the second half.

Our accountant handled our tax returns with grace and aplomb again this year, and we filed electronically for the first time. As a result, we got our refunds (substantial!) within two weeks. We are paying bills madly and loving it. It’s a huge relief to hack away at debt.

Both HRH and I went for annual checkups with our new family doctor, who noted some oddities in my exam and sent me for an appointment with a specialist. I was fine about it until the night before, when the potential repercussions finally sank in. Fortunately, the specialist checked me out, and said, “Um, I’m not seeing what your GP saw at all. You look perfectly healthy to me. We’ll wait for results of this test, but I’m pretty sure you’re clear.” So more relief!

I ordered books when my last freelance cheque arrived. So far I have torn through Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal and Incarnate by Jodi Meadows in less than a week. I have Elizabeth Bear’s and Seanan McGuire’s new books waiting to be read next, and the new Guy Gavriel Kay on reserve at the library, too.

We picked up our free tree for the city this weekend, and got a bonus little white lilac. All the trees have leaves starting to bud, and the birds are very happy indeed. HRH has doubled the size of the vegetable garden, and is starting to draw up plans for the new fence he’ll be building this summer. Owlet is thrilled to be playing “osside,” and keeps herself very busy carrying pieces of gravel all over the place and squirrelling them away. HRH found a handful in the watering can this morning, and I found about half a cup in Sparky’s butterfly net. She’d have slept with a rock last night if we’d let her; it was very difficult getting it out of her grubby little fist.

Work is all-consuming, and while going well, it’s draining. The lack of down time in which my brain can relax is really having a negative impact on my quality of life in general. I got a raise a couple of weeks ago in recognition of the “consistently thorough and thoughtful work I do,” which was absolutely lovely to hear. Also wonderful is the confirmation that Owlet is registered for three days a week of daycare in Sparky’s old centre starting at the end of summer, so all I have to do is get through the next three months of working during naps and evenings, and then I will have three workdays a week. No more working nights and naps, and not getting enough sleep! (There was stress and angst surrounding the whole daycare thing, because we’d been on a waiting list and due to start this fall after Owlet turned two, and then suddenly a bunch of the kids who were going to leave were staying on, and the daycare director’s schedules and plans were all thrown up in the air. She worked it all out, bless her, by opening a second private daycare.)

I registered Sparky for summer camp this past week. He had so much fun last year for the two-week session he did that thanks to Nana’s help again, he’s doing two sessions this summer. He’s started doing provincial testing at school, and thank goodness he’s not of an age where that means stress yet. He keeps coming home and casually saying things like, “We did exam stuff in math today, and I got it all right.” His cello bow snapped about a month ago (we theorize that there was an existing fracture, because the way it broke was at odds with how it fell) and his replacement arrived two weeks ago. We’ve had a recent breakthrough with reading sheet music, hand placement, and bow management, so he’s suddenly sounding much better than he was at the beginning of the year. He’s chosen piano for his music class at camp, so we shall see how that goes.

There’s been a bunch of knitting and spinning, but I don’t have time to post that. Sometime this week, maybe. After I hand my latest project in, that is.

Owlet: Twenty Months Old!

She slept restlessly for a lot of this past month. I thought it was spring, maybe, or the hard transition to one nap a day, or the damn canines finally settling into place… but now we think it was a language development upgrade running at night. Suddenly we have things like: Read, read book?, clock, bless you!, allons-y (usually followed by go go go, but all in a tumble of sound so it’s more like allonsygogogo!, which rather suits the emotion of the statement). She chirped “Congratulations!” to Sparky after I said it when he finished Pokemon Black the other week. She calls snow “no,” which is what a lot of us feel about it at this time of year, frankly. And we have “Merci bye-bye!” followed by a serious blown kiss, which is generally reserved for the people at the deli counter in the grocery store who give her a slice of pretty much anything she points at while I’m ordering freshly cut cold meat. She thinks the deli counter is her personal buffet. They would have started slicing the cheese she pointed at with a charming grin and a “This?” if I hadn’t stopped them a couple of weeks ago. And we are finally starting to get animals identified by more than the sound they make. We actually heard her say “horse” the other day, and “dog.” Rabbits are hophops, though she calls her blanket bunny Bunny.

Sentences are starting to be more common. “Bird!” she said the other day when we were walking in a parking lot, leaning back and pointing gup. “Fying! Sky!” When I queried her, she strung them all together: “Bird fying sky!” And then there was “Here, Ee-yah, put cup here.” After which Sparky turned to HRH with wide eyes, saying, “She just said a whole sentence and I understood her!”

But the most hilarious language-related development is her use of the word ‘delicious.’ She may have picked it up from us, because when she pretends to feed us something we generally say, “Mmm, delicious.” So when we ask her, for example, “Is your mushroom good?” we are rewarded with “EeeeeeeISHush!” And she says it with such gusto that we can’t help laughing. But the other day, HRH caught her putting something into her mouth: “Wait, what have you got in your mouth? Open. Open! Is it a sticker?” So we checked, but there was nothing. We turned back to getting supper ready, and I said, “Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now. I hope it was good.” And from behind HRH and I came: “EeeeeeeISHush!”

Firsts this month include her first taste of tire d’érable on snow (I picked up a small jar of tire, HRH scooped up some clean snow from the back of the house, I warmed the tire up in the microwave and poured it on the snow for the kids; it’s the closest we’ll come to cabane a sucre, because they’re shockingly expensive and honestly, I hate most of the food apart from the tire), first homemade playdough, and her first serious watercolour painting and finger-painting. Someone adores painting in every form. (Also note: neither of these were finger-painting sessions. That didn’t stop her from using the technique.)

Grandma taught her how to play Ring Around the Rosie, and she made poor Grandma play it a billionty times in a row. She had her first real phone conversation, too, with Daddy. She did her first Easter Egg hunt, which was lots of fun:

She wore a pretty periwinkle blue dress with a blue-green floral chiffon skirt at Easter (I think it was Wynter’s—does it look familiar, Annika?), but every single photo is blurred because she couldn’t stop darting around at her grandparents’ house. So we’re going with the arty one that looks blurry on purpose:

Ceri and Scott passed along Ada’s booster seat, and while Owlet thought it was the best thing ever for about a week, she started resisting it, likely because she prefers to sit or kneel on a regular chair. So we only use her wooden high chair at supper now; all other meals she gets a real chair. Which is kind of funny, because she runs to it and hauls herself up onto the seat on her tummy, but usually gets her head stuck under the table while doing it.

She loves playing with the iPad, so much so that we have to have strict rules about when she can play with it and for how long. (Out of sight, out of mind is the best way to deal with it, we have discovered.) Her favourite app is Endless ABC, and she can rearrange the jumbled letters and drag them to their shadows in remarkably impressive time. She took the letter L off the fridge the other day and waved it at me, going “Luh-luh-luh-LUH-luh-luh” like the letter L in the game does when you try to drag it into the correct spot. So, er, hello, knowledge sponge. She loves the Kids CBC app and sings along with the Dirt Girl theme song, and is starting to get into matching/Memory game apps. But she also loves the simplicity of Fantasy Music Box and the Little Fox Music app, which she likes for the songs as well as the studio section where she can touch different things to make noises and sounds against a beat.

She came up to me one morning while I was casting on for a toddler sweater I’m test-knitting for an acquaintance, and said, “Eit? Eit?” I thought she was saying eight, because she was looking at the ends of the needles where the size is printed, so I told her no, they were size 7s. She took the needles away from me and clicked the tips together a few times. Turns out she was saying, “Knit? Knit?”

At the thrift shop the other day we found not one but two pairs of barely-used shoes for her. One is a just-fit for now (purple lace-up ankle boots! she saw them and pestered me till I handed them to her, and then she yanked off her boots and tried to shove them on her feet by herself) and the others are a pair of suede t-straps, a size or two bigger for this fall. That day after her nap, she insisted that she put on the ones she had picked and she stomped around in them all afternoon, very pleased with herself. I got a parcel in the mail that day and there was bubble wrap in it, so Sparky put it on the floor and showed her how to stomp on it. She made very satisfying sounds with those shoes on!

On the same thrift store trip I found an older Little People house there for three dollars, which was missing the doors and didn’t come with any furniture or people, but she adores it. She is especially fascinated with the bathroom, and has given all the Little People and equivalent sized figures we have a turn on the potty and several baths. On another thrift store trip we scored a little china tea set for $2, and the tea parties began! We’ve already misplaced the creamer and the green cup has broken, but that’s not slowing anyone down.

She walked up to stand next to me in the kitchen a couple of weeks ago, and sang, “Tiyul, tiyul, i-al STAH… howAwaaa-aaawha-ooAAAAH.” And she kept going, looking at me with a tiny smile on her face. At the end she grinned and started clapping for herself. She sings along with stuff, but I’ve never heard her voluntarily sing a whole song on her own before. She randomly does bits of the alphabet song, and requests “Baa Baa Black Sheep” often during diaper changes. We’ve started to listen to a playlist just for her in the car with some of her favourite songs on it, and after each one she says, “Thank you!” She’s such a sparkling, giggly, drop of pure sunshine. Sure, things get cranky and hard, and teeth are jerks, as Ceri says; but she’s a sunny little thing. We’re fortunate parents–again.