Owlet has decided that all dresses and long skirts are called ‘ballets.’ “I like your ballet!” she says to anyone in a dress. “Noooo, I want to wear my butterfly ballet!” she says when we offer her any of her dresses. (The butterfly ballet is actually this dress with flowers on it. Preschooler language; you learn it or you die.)

Her favourite books are Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and William Mayne’s The Patchwork Cat. Her favourite movie is now Despicable Me 2, or “minions” in preschooler-speak.

She has just begun her four days a week at preschool, after a month off. For the past couple of weeks she’s been having two play dates there per week, arriving after snack and playing till lunch, participating in circle time and some games. There was water play on the really nice days. It got to a point where the kids would see us through the windows as we were walking up, and start shouting that “Bee” was here, with great excitement. (Apparently that nickname arises spontaneously elsewhere, which is amusing because it’s one of our little nicknames for her within the family, too.) The play date time was open to all the kids and mums who were going to be merging into the big daycare, but Owlet was the only one who made it to all four. (The educator tells me that Owlet had the least trouble merging into the routine in the first week, and credits her attendance at the play dates for it.) I sat with whatever mum had come with her kid that day and watched everyone play. It was hard but interesting to watch her be shy, to try to fit herself into the games being played by children who’d known each other for a year or more, or who knew her but knew their immediate playmates better. It’s a new dynamic; she has to figure out how she fits in, and then the group dynamic has to resettle as well.

We got her a new My Little Pony backpack, and there was a little coil-bound coloring kit we got at the same time, which she calls her “schedule.” She wore the backpack out of the store very proudly, and as soon as she got out of the car at home she sat down on the driveway and opened it to find “my schedule, Mummy, I have to check my schedule.”

Chalk is her newest big obsession. We picked up some packs of big, soft play chalk one day in August, and we didn’t even get inside the house before both kids wanted to tear open the packaging and start drawing on the driveway. Owlet is very into drawing legs on things that I draw for her, long spindly legs that sometimes aren’t attached to the body of whatever owns them. Or even attached to things that usually don’t have them, like apples.

I had the brilliant idea of bringing the easel up from downstairs and setting it up in the enclosed side porch right next to the kitchen so she’d have an art station up here instead of having to set something up on the kitchen table every time. I bought a new roll of art paper, too, so now when she wants to draw or paint, she can sit right there and do it. It should be good through the winter; HRH just has a bit more weatherizing to do to prevent the occasional snow drift, and the plank floor will be covered with foam squares to cut the cold air from seeping up as well.

On that chalkboard she drew the first thing that actually really looks like what she said it was. “Look, I drawed a fish!” she said, and yes, she really did. The eyes and the head are in the upper left, and it swoops around and down, with the tail at the bottom centre:

(We don’t know exactly why there is an unhappy face inside the fish. That part of the narrative was not shared with us. But we can make some pretty informed guesses.)

Other new things include Popsicles, tacos (we never thought those would fly, but we are so very wrong), learning to rinse and spit with her new toothpaste, having her fingernails painted with polish for the first time, and discovering Wonder Woman thanks to Ceri, Scott, and Ada gifting her with a Wonder Woman-themed birthday present.

Recently she’s really gotten into developing and telling stories, constructing little narratives. Most recently there have been things like, “It’s so dark. It is night? Where are the spirits? Some are sleeping, and some go to the bathhouse. There is a spirit who wanted to go to the bathhouse but didn’t know how to get there, so he jumped, like a rabbit, and he turned into a rabbit, and hop hop hopped to the bathhouse.” (That’s a blend of Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away and her own little story about a spirit.)

The other odd thing is her insistence that everything is named “Dead.” At first we thought she was mangling the pronunciation of Jed, or Deb, or Jen… but no. “I see a dog! It’s name is Dead.” It’s mildly disturbing if we think about it too long and try to read too much into it, but it’s just a word to her. She’s too busy to take into account her parent’s weird hangups. There’s dancing to do.