Oh, the words. New this month are: Mushroom, tomato (“may toe”), drink, toes, flowers, butterflies, bug, bath (we must be careful saying this, as she will beetle directly into the bathroom, start drumming the edge of tub with her hands, and say, “Bath. Bath? Bath!” then get very cross if we say that it isn’t a bath night), dance, again, UP-down, outside, happy! happy! happy!, happy baby, angry! grr (that’s all one unit: “Angry!grr“), mine, sky, sun,moon, and sad.

This month also saw her first three-word sentence: “Where Papa go?”

Singing has suddenly exploded as well. Owlet sings “Twinkle” with me, not that anyone would necessarily recognize it. We started off with her supplying the last word in each line, but now she burbles along. She sings the “ABC” song with Sparky, too, much to his delight, although most of the letters are e, d, or g. She also sings “Baa baa black sheep,” with some serious head-banging for the “yes sir” bits. (It’s so serious that we can’t sing it if we’re sitting at a table, because she will crack her forehead on it.) She sang the first two lines of the Cat in the Hat theme song when it appeared on PBS today, much to the astonishment of Sparky and me. It’s very simple and mostly repetitive; I’m not surprised that she can sing “Go, go, go, go” of course, but “on an adventure” was kind of a shock. (It was more like “onna vedjur,” but it was in time and on beat.) We read Goodnight Moon and I can pause to let her fill in lots of the items listed throughout it, too.

Furniture-moving is one of her newest pastimes. She likes to shove her bench out into the middle of the living room to stand on it. In the kitchen, if I’m doing something on a counter, she’ll drag a chair over to counter next to me, climb it, stands to help me bake. (Which, yesterday, involved her dropping a whole measuring cup into the Kitchenaid bowl, and sinking her entire hand into cake batter after it had been poured into the pan. So helpful.) We can’t build tents as easily as we could in the old living room with Sparky, who adored them, but sometimes I can manage this:

Another of her idiosyncrasies is her pretend sleep: She’ll flop over and start snoring really loudly… with her eyes open, watching us. Too funny! She has also discovered stickers. The kids got Brave sticker books from Santa when they saw him at Christmas, and she dragged one out the other day. Stickers are awesome! They stick to things! Like noses! And doors! And the fridge! And the cat! Thank goodness these ones are designed to peel off and restick in the book, but even they pick up dust and grime and stop sticking. Time to pick some assorted sticker books up in the dollar store now and then and tuck them away for days when we need something new.

Poor Owlet. We had a horrible February, as all four of her canines decided to come in at once. They were huge, swollen, white lumps in her gums, and she was miserable. The top two broke through two days apart during the first week of March, and the right bottom one has just emerged. The bottom left one is still a lump, but she’s back to her usual cheerful self. I think her appetite is finally slowing down. But that may have been the teeth. She still steals tea even though I give her her own.

We seem to be stuck between one two-hour (or more) nap, and two hour and a half-long naps. It’s hard. We kind of play it by ear as the day goes. Some days she makes it till past 10:30 and naps for two hours. Most days she goes down around 10, and naps for only 1.5 ish hours. If that happens I gauge her mood and usuallyput her down for a catnap around 2:30. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m thinking the time change may actually help us out in this respect.

She really loves sitting on the big potty. None of this kid potty thing for her! No, if everyone else uses the big one, she will too. So I got the child insert from storage and she cheerfully asks to sit on it several times a day, reading books or brushing her teeth. Nothing has actually happened yet, but it has to at some point.

Colouring is going better. Except she has to be supervised extremely carefully, because apparently our wood-based decor is in need of some colour. I went to pour another cup of tea the other day and when I came back twenty seconds later, I found red crayon on the floor. So I scrubbed it off with a tissue, saying, “No! Crayons go on paper.” And because she loves to clean and I wanted to reinforce the lesson, I handed her the tissue and asked her to help clean it up. She scrubbed at the mark industriously, and then turned and scrubbed at the mark she’d made on the bookshelf, then the other bookshelf, the spines of the books on that second bookshelf, the spinning wheel, and her bench. (!!!)

Sometimes she goes after Gryff, saying, “No! No, meow!” then a string of baby gibberish that very clearly tells the cat off for doing whatever she thinks he’s not supposed to do. Granted, we do shoo him away from various places and things, so it’s definitely imitative behaviour. Once she kept yelling at him to get him away from his dish, and it took us a moment or two to realise that she was imitating us shooing him away from Cricket’s dish when she imagines something is scaring her and runs off, leaving food in her bowl. So we find ourselves now having to tell Owlet that no, it’s all right, the cat is allowed to do whatever he’s doing. Except in the past couple of days we’ve noticed her shooing Cricket away from her own bowl, so apparently she thinks no cat is ever supposed to eat from that bowl, ever.

Her hair is a lovely honey colour, a warm light brown. Her curls are getting longer, which means the weight is pulling them down a bit and they’re becoming more waves with a half-ringlet at the bottom. Her hair dries super-curly, but it’s so fine that the curl slips out of it after sleeping or wearing a hat. Sometimes she reaches for my green spray bottle in the bathroom, and I spray her hair and squish it into curls for her. She loves the spray bottle, thank goodness. We’re sweeping her uneven, thin bangs to the side at the moment, but I wonder if trimming them to an even fringe might work better. (My heart just about stops every time I consider that. My baby can’t possibly be old enough to need a haircut.)