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

You want pictures.

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

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

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

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

“My knitting!” she said importantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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