Category Archives: Photographs

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.)

Spinning and the Tour de Fleece 2013

So there’s this spinning thing that runs concurrently with that big bike race in France. (They race on bicycles for about three weeks. There are mountains. I like my version better.) Basically, you spin every day the contenders cycle, and rest the days they rest. It is traditional to have some sort of personal challenge to echo the challenge days in the Tour de France.

This year, I chose two challenges: spinning silk hankies (basically an empty silk moth cocoon that’s been soaked and stretched out; the actual name is mawata), and spinning some big chunky yarn. Like so many other spinners, I lost the ability to do the latter once I’d gained the ability to spin very finely. Those plus trying to spin as often as I could would be more than enough, I figured. But to start with I rummaged through my fibre stash and pulled out what my fingers decided felt nicest that day, a 50-gram twist of green Fleece Artist Merino sliver. (Maybe I should have called that a challenge, too. I am terrible at deciding what to spin next, and this was akin to closing my eyes and choosing randomly.)

Well, I spun every single day during the three-week race. And I blew through my two challenges early on (and plied them together to boot), with the added bonuses of plying 1200 yards of luxury singles I’d spun earlier in the year for Mum’s yarn, spinning 50 g of Fleece Artist Merino, and getting halfway through 6 oz of batts I’d had in my stash for about three years. I spun and plied an awful lot of yarn.

Here’s my output:

Clockwise from top:

– Fleece Artist Merino sliver in Rainforest, spun worsted and chain-plied (239 yards)
– Spiral yarn made with my two challenges, a thread spun from silk hankies dyed by myself (also on the storage bobbin at the centre, about 7 g) and a Coopworth single (64 yards)
– Bobbin of 3 oz woollen-spun worsted weight single, from Spin Knit & Life batts (Falkland, mohair, domestic wool in blended blues and browns)
– In the bottom of the basket: the 1200 yards of plied luxury yarn, one ply of 50/50 silk/cashmere, one ply of 50/50 silk/Merino (8.5 oz, 1200 yards)

And in addition to this, I saw some fabulous yarns being made, interacted with awesome people, and made lots of notes on new indie dyers to check out and techniques to try. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I spun the second half of the batts the day after the Tour finished. Here’s all 455 yards of worsted weight singles, ready to be knit into a shawl:

I need to crow a bit here. I was invited to enter my Fleece Artist skein into a draw for people who’d spun fibre from that dyer, and I won! So this pretty little green skein netted me a copy of Clara Parke’s The Knitter’s Book of Yarn:

(I really wish I had more of the fibre so I could spin enough for a pair of socks. Now that I know the colourway, I can order more sometime and do just that.)

In the past week I spun an ounce of honey-coloured silk to ply with the bobbin of green Merino singles that has been waiting patiently since January (Ashland Bay ‘Sage’, to be precise). That yarn is looking very pretty indeed so far:

And last on my list of spinning stuff to journal about, it turns out that my sample skeins lied as badly as gauge swatches do in knitting. I am about 500 yards short on Mum’s yarn. Fortunately I have found an online retailer who has both the silk/Merino and the silk/cashmere in stock and will sell me two ounces of each so I can spin up the rest. As cranky as I am about being wrong, it will be lovely to spin more of these fibre blends; it was dreamy to do, and plying was a real treat as well.

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.

Summer Vacation Begins

Portfolios have been brought home, report cards received (all very good, thank you), the backpack has been emptied, and we are on summer hols here in the dollhouse. We’re bumping against one another a bit while we find our summer rhythm.

In a nutshell:

It is hot. And humid. And stormy.

HRH demolished the old, rotting fence on the north-west side of the property and built a new one — in three days. This is it, only halfway done:

Owlet has a cold, a nose-streaming, whiny, sneezy cold. She must have caught it at the daycare get-to-know-you picnic party. Ah, the joys of challenging the immune system.

I have a concert in four days. That would be July 1, if you missed it. We’re playing Dvorak Slavic Dances, and Strauss, and Warlock’s Capriol suite, among others. Nice stompy and swingy stuff.

I finished spinning the undyed BFL/silk single and plied it with the waiting single I spun from the lavender/green/chestnut braid of My Own Fibre Club BFL/silk I dyed in April. And I completely misjudged the weight. (Not the mass, the diameter of the yarn.) So now I have 1100 yards of light silk laceweight, which does not work for what I was spinning it for at all. (Which was a lace shawlette calling for 475 yards of sock weight yarn. Yeah, I really blew it. I should have chain-plied the dyed single and skipped the other ply entirely.)

For my June edition of My Own Fibre Club, I dyed some silk hankies to spin in the upcoming Tour de Fleece. I did a two-part process, dyeing them with yellow, purple, blue, and green in the first step, then overdyeing them with blue in the second, and ended up with some truly lovely Peacock hankies.

Last weekend Sparky had his birthday party #3, the Friends From School edition, and it went very well indeed. HRH scratch-built a Minecraft cake landscape from cubes of fondant that he painted. It was a big hit.

Books… I read Elizabeth Bear’s The Shattered Pillars and it was very good, managing to not fall victim to middle-book-of-a-trilogy syndrome. I read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was so very, very perfect and bright and sharp. I am rereading Possession, because I have to do that every five years or so.

No work coming in, which is both worrisome and welcome. My fibro meds aren’t settling the way I was hoping they would; maybe it will take another couple of weeks to adjust.

The kitten is settling in very, very well. She loves playing with the children, purrs loudly when she snuggles into your lap, and has quite the personality. Gryff approves.

That’s what’s happening. Back into the fray.

Recent Excitement

1. We have a new kitten. She’s three months old, and it only took our big orange cat Gryffindor two days of suspicion before he started romping with her. His hisses were half-hearted, though. I think they were mostly for show.

Gryff has been clingy and needy since Cricket left us. He’s always been one of a multiple-cat household, and very social; he was miserable without another cat around. The original plan was to get another cat at the end of the summer, when Owlet turned two. Well, that plan was moved up for Gryff’s sake. Last Sunday afternoon we visited the city shelter, and came home with a wee brown and grey tabby. Meet Minerva (McGonagall, of course):

She’s zippy and so energetic that she may tire out both the kids and Gryff, now that he acknowledges that she exists in his own reality. The first evening, she raced laps in our bedroom, under the bed, up one side, running across under my knees, throwing herself off the other side, then repeating the whole thing. She’s three months old, is slim and tiny, and has wee kitten claws and wee kitten teeth. We put her carrier in a quiet part of the living room when we got her home, and I found Owlet pushing the straw of her water bottle and goldfish crackers in through the wire door to share with the kitten on two different occasions while we made supper.

We all had a really good feeling about this. We wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise, as disappointed as everyone would have been to come home kitten-less. We’re good at judging personalities and energy and estimating how they’ll fit into the energy of the family and house. Minerva was grounded, forthright and self-assured without being aggressive, and wasn’t afraid of the children. She fit in right away.

2. Sparky turned eight last Tuesday, and we celebrated his birthday this weekend en famille. My parents came in from out of town and HRH’s parents came over, too. The birthday boy requested cheeseburgers and ice cream cake for his birthday feast, which also doubled as our Father’s Day celebration, so that’s what we had for lunch on Sunday. He specified ice cream cake with an Oreo crust, a bottom layer of chocolate ice cream, and a top layer of peanut butter ice cream, so I made that Sunday morning. We had it with whipped cream and homemade hot fudge sauce, and it was really good. My mother, who does not eat desserts, had a slice and enjoyed it immensely, which was all I needed to know it was really good. (I knew everyone else would like it, and I’m glad they did. It’s just that Mum doesn’t eat desserts, so wow.)

3. Sunday afternoon Sparky and I had our end-of-year cello recital. Sparky played “Song of the Wind” extremely well, clearly, in tune, and in tempo. I had the pleasure of accompanying him again. I did a “Chanson Triste” that people thought was excellent, but I knew had been better in rehearsal. And then we played lots of good movie music as an ensemble, and we totally killed our teacher’s original four-cello-part arrangement of “Skyfall,” which we segued into after playing the James Bond theme. (I don’t know about the audience, but most of the students up on stage had goosebumps!) My teacher now has twenty students, so it made for a long afternoon, but it was good. It was great to have Marc M and Marc L in the audience, and both HRH’s parents and my parents this time; my parents haven’t heard me play for years.

My teacher is raising her lesson fees for the first time in ages next year, so it looks like I’ll have to stick to my biweekly schedule instead of returning to a weekly lesson. (Assuming I ever work again. It’s been six weeks since the publisher sent me a project. Feast or famine, that’s what this is, and I know it. Still, work would be nice, what with Owlet’s private daycare costs about to begin in August. Especially since the whole point in putting her into daycare was so that I could get work done without making myself sicker.)

4. The Tour de Fleece is coming up! This is a for-fun spinning event that runs concurrent with the Tour de France. I was so excited that I cleared my wheels two weeks ago, which was kind of a dumb move. So I’m doing my vanilla spinning now to get it out of the way and fill my time before the TdF begins at the end of June. I’ve got an undyed BFL and BFL/silk blend going on my Symphony to ply with a bobbin of dyed BFL/silk I’ve already spun, and I’m doing some longdraw singles from heathered plum roving on my Baynes Colonial to get used to woollen spinning on it.

5. It’s the last week of school for Sparky. (We got next year’s supply and fee lists today, and I’m having trouble parsing the fact that he’ll be in grade three in September.) He has a final birthday party coming up next Sunday for five friends. Then after that it’s the Canada Day concert, two weeks off for everyone, and then day camp begins for Sparky. I’ve made it through the past two weeks; I just need to make it through the next couple.

Sparky: Eight Years Old!

These birthday photo posts are getting very long. Hmm…

There was a wave of “no way he’s eight!” going around Twitter and Facebook this morning, and really, we’re right there with you all.

Eight years ago today, during a humid heatwave, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready well till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

Six…

Seven…

EIGHT!

Eight years ago he was born nine weeks early, and we’ve been trying to keep up with him ever since. (That thing about preemies sometimes being slower at milestones and having to adjust gestational/chronological age expectations? Totally untrue in our case.)

I love his vocabulary, I love his weird sense of humour, I love how he tells stories that go on and on (and on… and even when I am exasperated because he can’t draw them to a close, I love his imagination). I love how he can look at something two-dimensional and turn it into a three-dimensional structure with Lego or another building medium. He’s really into plasticine and modelling compounds right now.

I don’t know what level he’s reading at any more. He just reads, and reads anything and everything, and in both English and French. HRH had to put the kibosh on Sparky looking at the open Harry Potter book they’re reading together at night, because Sparky is reading silently to himself and is going much faster than HRH reads aloud. I’ve come in for my turn reading to him a couple of times recently and found him reading a few chapters ahead in The Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke, the chapter book we’re reading together right now, too.

He’s wearing size 7-8 shirts, and size 7 pants for length (but his size 6 shorts are fitting him just fine in the waist, and even some of his old size 5 ones). He’s in size 13 or youth size 1 shoes, depending on the style.

This year has been absolutely wonderful for him at school. It was hard at the beginning, but his teacher has been excellent, and he’s worked hard both in class and at home, and he’s now pretty much bilingual. We are super proud of him, and I have no doubt that his end-of-year report card will blow us away just like his last one did. He’s worked hard at cello, too, and he’s excited about the recital this weekend. This summer he has four weeks of his arts day camp, and he’s lookig forward to that.

He is thoughtful, sensitive, loving, and enjoys sharing what he loves with other people. He and Owlet play together wonderfully, and it has been such a privilege to watch him grow and learn. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that he’ll be in Grade Three in a couple of months.

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.