This past month, Owlet learned how to play hide and seek. I tripped across this while some of Sparky’s godsisters were playing it with him while they were visiting, and found Owlet sitting under the chair at my sewing table. “What are you doing there?’ I asked. “Ssh,” she said. “She’s playing hide and seek,” HRH explained, who was helping. It was rather adorable. So now she has added “hidaseek?” to her game of “chase me, chase me!” It’s nice to have a wider range of games to choose from.

She learned “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman” at daycare, and sang them all December long with great gusto. Or rather, she sang the first verse of each over and over. Sparky and I managed to teach her the “fa la la” bits of “Deck the Halls,” which provided some relief for our ears.

This holiday season she finally got the concept of parties, too. The first one was the daycare party. “Par tee?” she said. “Chrissmass par tee? Chrissmass par tee, yay!” “More par tee,” she cried when we had to leave to take her home for her nap, an hour later than usual. We promised her more par tees throughout the month, and she grudgingly agreed to leave.

The laid-back “Shuuure!” has returned to her vocabulary, which has levelled up again in an undefinable way. Maybe it’s just that her pronunciation has sharpened a bit, making what she says generally less fuzzy and easier to understand. Maybe it’s the new and as-of-yet still occasional use of the pronoun “I.” Maybe it’s that she’s putting concepts into words more easily than she used to. All I know is that not understanding her is now a rarity, and when she does say something that is gibberish-like to our ears, it’s more frustrating than ever for everyone involved because we’re all so used to communicating clearly.

She has similarly levelled up in her physical self. Suddenly a bunch of her leggings and pants are too short (speaking of which, Sparky’s jeans all suddenly all too short as well, argh); suddenly the sleeves of her snowsuit are just barely long enough; suddenly half her socks are only good for wearing to bed now. She can put her hands into her mittens and get her thumbs into the mittens’ thumbs on the first try. (WOO! We worked really hard on that this winter, let me tell you.) She can go up and down the stairs without a death grip on the railing or an adult’s hand. And I’m just going to come out and say it: She’s toilet trained. We were holding off confirming it until we knew she was night trained, and she’s mostly fine then. She wears a pull-up just in case, but they’re dry in the morning. During the day she takes herself off to use her small potty whenever she needs to and often doesn’t tell us, which means we have to remember to check it periodically.

Her two-year-old molars are finally coming in, after a couple of months of irritation. The lower left one is in, and the lower right has finally broken through. She’s old enough to stick her fingers in her mouth and say, “Mouth hurts, Ty Knoll, pease.”

Her current favourite books are In a People House, her Frozen storybook, and the Sofia the First book she got for Christmas.

Bedtime has become a kerfuffle of sorts. She goes to bed nicely for her dad, not so much for me. So we’ve split up the bedtime routine: I do the reading part, and HRH takes over for the cuddle. It makes me a bit sad, because I love the cuddle part of bedtime, and I miss singing to her, but this way it’s over in half an hour as opposed to two hours. She just thinks it’s playtime if I’m cuddling her, and still hasn’t figured out that if she’s quiet I’ll stay, but if she continues to bounce around our time together will be over, and then we have to go through the crying and the repeated returning her to her bed.

Over the Christmas break, Janice brought us the stunning quilt that she has been working on since before Owlet was born, and it’s simply beautiful. Back when she proposed doing it, I gave her a general colour palette, and we discussed patterns. I wanted something that looked like a Brigid’s cross, and we found a pinwheel variation that looked perfect with the right piecing. The guild acquaintance whom Jan had lined up to do the actual quilting got through her queue of other work and finished it up this fall. It’s crib sized, and I was worried that the switch to the big-girl bed meant we wouldn’t see it very often, but it’s folded and lying across the foot of her bed so we can see it every day, and the colours work perfectly both against the coverlet and in her room.

Look how gorgeous this is.

And look how the feathery quilting motif softens the right angles of the pieced quilt top.

(The quilt is straight. My photos and how the quilt was laid on the bed are not.)

The soft green flannel of the back complements it perfectly, and I cannot get over how perfect the binding and border fabric is; the brown and gold pulls everything together. You can see the quilting motif really well on this side.

Both my children are very, very fortunate to have heirloom-quality quilts made for them with love by family friends, along with the heirloom-quality knitted items. Someday they’ll know just how wonderful all that stuff is. For now, they just know joy because we have friends who love them, whether they bear gifts or not.

(Yay, finally! I’ll backdate this in a day or two.)

Owlet is two, and we’re seeing that in her behaviour. There are sudden leaps in vocabulary and creative thinking, and wonderful personality quirks emerging, and there are sudden stormy breakdowns over what we think are minor things.

One of her current quirks that I just love is her interest in writing down words. Sometimes she just dictates letters to me and I write them down for her, but other times she will bring a pencil and paper over, hoist herself up on the chesterfield next to me, and say, “Gandma and Papa,” and point to the paper. So I write down Grandma and Papa. Then she says, “Mirva.” And I write down Minerva. “Giffindar,” she says next. I write Gryffindor. “Daddy!” she says, pleased. “Mummy! Nana! Gandad! Eeeyam! Blue! Geen! Pupple!” Then she takes the paper and slides off the chesterfield and carries it around with her for a while. It’s her way of taking the things she loves with her.

Potty training has really taken off, so well that we can pretty much say that she’s done. We keep finding the little potty full of stuff, which means she’s trotting off and taking care of things on her own without telling us. One of her newest phrases is “Clean all day!” And in fact, we have had a couple of dry nights as well, which is pretty awesome.

Also in the line of common two-year-old behaviour, we get lots of “SELF!” She insists on getting dressed on her own (even her socks, which amazes me, because Sparky could not get the hang of putting socks on until he was almost four). She does her own shoes and boots, and her Robeez slippers, and when we have come home from school and she has put her own slippers on she enthusiastically puts mine on for me, too. Of course, I have to raise my foot to her eye level, which is kind of hard on my lower back, but it’s worth it to see how proud she is of getting them on my feet.

Bedtime this past month has been a challenge. There has been some raging crying some nights at bedtime, and I’ve had to sit next to her bed and hold her hand until she’s asleep. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde; you don’t know which Owlet you’ll get when you start the bedtime routine. We recently caught on to part of it; she thinks she’s missing something when we put her to bed. So we showed her Sparky in his pyjamas in bed, we got into our jammies early to say goodnight to her, and we turned off all the lights so when she peeks out of her room she sees that the house has gone to bed. It has mostly worked, so I think we finally figured it out. In the weeks leading up to the switch to the big bed we’ve been having a lot of “Sit Mummy, sit” when I put her to bed; she wanted company while she fell asleep. That would have been fine, except when she has company she thinks it’s playtime. It’s one of the reasons we figured it was time for the switch to the bed from the crib. It was kind of a reset of the bedtime routine. Now we curl up in her bed to read together, and snuggle and sing, and she knows she has a defined cuddle time after that.

The biggest news, and the reason this post was delayed a few days, was the introduction of the big girl bed. Owlet is in complete and utter head-over-heels love with it.

The first nap was a bit rough, but after that everything has gone swimmingly. Once we’ve finished stories, songs, and cuddle and we leave, we can hear her patter across the floor and crack open the door to peek out, but then she closes the door and races back and goes to sleep. In fact, we have to wake her up most mornings. She’s sleeping so hard that not even opening her blind and letting in the cat wakes her up…

We are seeing more sudden toddler breakdowns resulting from things like telling her she has to sit at the table to eat peanut butter and crackers, like we always have. No, she wants to eat them on the chesterfield, right here, right now, and the world will end if she does not. Do you want the world to end, Mummy? Of course you don’t. So bring the crackers HERE. Except we keep calmly telling her that if she wants PB crackers she has to come to the table for them, and it’s like we’re telling her that we have to cut off one of her arms before she gets that snack.

Since we’re talking about food, I’ll mention that like Sparky did at her age, she loves gravy on everything. “Dips? Dips?” she’ll ask when she gets served food. Grandma and Papa served applesauce with the ribs the last time we were over for dinner and she was all for it. Maybe we can get away with warming up some applesauce and putting it on her plate to dip everything into, because making quick pan gravy at just about every meal is getting old fast. (I remember making a large batch of gravy and freezing it in an ice cube tray when Sparky was at this stage; maybe Ill have to do that again.) I introduced her to mayonnaise the other day when she demanded dips for her carrot sticks, and I had to give her more three times during that meal alone.

At the end of November my rehearsal with my accompanist was cancelled on a Saturday morning, so I bundled all my equipment back inside, and Owlet decided she needed to come upstairs and that I should play my cello for her. She’s never asked this before. So up we went. I played my recital piece for her, and she was so good! She sat on the chaise longue exactly where I told her she’d have to sit, and I let her hold my Hermione doll while she did. When I was done she slipped down and came over and said, “Help?” So I let her put her hand on my bow hand and push the bow back and forth on the strings, which got her very excited. Then she wanted to do it alone, but I said no. So she grabbed Sparky’s bow and crouched over his cello, trying to play it. I managed to stop her in time there, too. Then I thought… why not?

I asked if she wanted to play her own cello. Yes, yes, Mummy, Owlet cello! So I got her installed in the living room again and went down into the storage room to get the old clunker viola Sparky used to use as his cello. We sat her in one of her tiny chairs, put a box in front of her to rest the viola on, and now we apparently have another cellist in the family.

It’s okay, I don’t think we have to look for a teacher just yet. Besides, we’re still hoping she chooses violin or piano or flute when she’s five and it’s time for music lessons.

As she gains more autonomy, life gets easier. Even with the slowdowns when SELF has to do it, it’s wonderful to be able to give her a direction and let her handle something. And the older she gets, the more easily she plays with Sparky, to both their enjoyment. They love one another very much, and even when they get frustrated with one another, it blows past quickly.