I am astonished at how quickly Owlet is changing. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be, seeing how she’s practically a different baby every day, and we’ve gone through this with Sparky… but wow. Suddenly we have a little girl.

We have an accident-prone little girl, to be honest. Owlet tripped over a mote of dust and drove the corner of a baseboard into the centre of her forehead last Friday night. Blood literally pouring down a child’s face onto a white shirt does interesting things to one’s focus. She’s mostly fine now. It’s her second head trauma this week. (The first one wasn’t this bad; she whacked the edge of her eye socket on the edge of the coffee table, bending down to pick up a cup. It split and bled, but wasn’t half as bad as this one.) HRH said she’s not allowed to walk ever again. If she’d been a bit worse we’d have taken her to emergency, but she seems fine apart from the gash. It possibly could have used 1-2 stitches, but waiting forever at the hospital and putting her through that would have been much more stressful for everyone. Owlet was her usual perky self half an hour after it happened, so things seem okay. I had forgotten how badly head wounds bleed. And Owlet hates cold things put against her face; she gets very angry. At least the cold washcloths and frozen packs distract her from the actual trauma. And we discovered that she has a latex sensitivity, so now she has the slightly curved gash in the middle of her forehead plus a raised red irritated circle around it from the band-aid we covered it with. HRH says it looks like a Do Not Enter sign. Let’s hope the baseboards pay attention next time.

In the less-than-dramatic column of achievements, Owlet adores brushing her teeth, climbing stars (and can do it very well now, so well that Sparky will let her climb them alone with him, much to our heart attack-inducing surprise when we discovered that), and helping unload the laundry basket and put her clean diapers away. She can throw together her stacking rings like a pro. While crayons are still too tempting to chew, she has discovered plain pencils, and loves to draw with one on the promotional pads of paper we get every couple of months in the mailbox from our local real estate office. Watching me draw cats and fish and houses fascinates her.

We tried a series of new sippy cups, because she was hauling away on the valve ones we’d been using since she was about eight months old and working so hard that I was envisioning disaster when we started giving her open cups. Three different kinds later, it turns out the cheap take n’ toss style are the winners. Although the straw cups aren’t a total loss; she just needs to remember not to tip them up like the other cups. They’re good for the car.

I am very impressed at how well she follows direction. “Switch the toy to your other hand and put this hand through your coat sleeve” was followed without hesitation the first time I said it. “Time to get your boots and coat on so we can go get Sparky” is followed by her bringing her boots to the door and plunking herself down in my lap, pointing up at her coat, and saying “Go, go, go” while trying to turn the doorknob afterward. It’s fascinating to watch her figure things out, too. She can drag things around and climb on them to reach higher. (This one is somewhat disconcerting.) She tried to squeeze through the cat door in the gate that blocks off the stairs to the attic office the other week, too, but got stuck with one arm, her head, and part of her torso through it.

She has started waving hello to people. She wanders around the schoolyard under the trees where we wait to meet Sparky, and waves cheerily at the other parents. She ran right up to a pair of twins around three years old yesterday and gave them each a handful of dead leaves. Slowly she’s starting to understand that it makes more sense if you wave goodbye before or while someone leaves so they can hear you. She loved Halloween; you could practically see her thinking, “Wait — we walk up to someone’s door, ring their bell, smile at them, they give us colourful things and then talk to us? Bring it on!” We don’t have photos of her because we were rushing from one thing to another, but we intend to dress her up again this coming weekend and take pictures of her then.

Her lower molars are coming in, and are currently huge swollen bumps in her lower jaw. She’s quick to grizzle these days, and has been erupting into small but fierce tantrums when something is taken away from her or she is told she cannot have something that she wants. She’s wearing size 24 months or 2T clothes in general, though we like her in 3T jumpers and dresses and her pants need to be at least 2-3T to accommodate the diapers, and size 5 shoes.

New words are showing up. She loves to eat “chzz” and drink “jsss”, and tell us to “go go go!” A “fsssh” is the first animal she says the name of instead of saying the sound it makes. (Possibly because “bubble bubble bubble” is hard for a fifteen-month-old to say?) Food is “nyum nyum nyum,” and after lunch she goes to the gate at the basement stairs and asks to watch “ss ss sse” (or Sesame Street, for those of you unacquainted with our daily routine). And “No,” is a big new one, usually said while shaking her head. Unfortunately it isn’t always accurate, because she sometimes says “no” and shakes her head when she actually means “yes,” which isn’t part of her vocabulary yet.

She points to steer us when we carry her, and brings books to us excitedly and jabs her finger at the text to make us read it. Her current favourite book is The Pigeon Has Feelings Too by Mo Willems. I read the bus driver’s request for the pigeon to show his happy face, then I look at her, and she draws herself up importantly and says, “Nnno!”, proud that she’s “reading” the next page where the pigeon says, “Never!” And she loves to “ticka ticka ticka” people and cats, which makes all of us laugh. She has developed a somewhat menacing toddler chuckle, which we call her evil chipmunk laugh, low and completely at odds with her cheerful, innocent persona. We all laugh whenever we hear it, which makes her laugh more, which… you get the idea.

(For comparison, here’s Sparky’s fifteen-month post.)

LATER: We went to her 15-month checkup. The good news is that her weight is beginning to level off, and she’s only at the 95th percentile instead of the 97th. (Are you laughing? I did.) She weighs just over 27 pounds. No wonder my lower back hurts! She’s now 32.5 inches tall, too. That’s still 97th percentile. Yikes. Well, this all explains the 2T clothes she needs to be wearing…