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.