Twenty-two months. She has the furrowed brow and intense concenration of her daddy, the chubby cheeks and sweet tooth of her mama. She is full of dance and laughter and silly shenanigans. She is still shockingly fearless, except when it comes to mice.
She can turn on the charm, especially when ice cream is at stake.
These days, she has much to say - phrases, sentences, requests, bargains ("One piece? Just one? Pleeeease?"). And we still constantly delight in the sweetness and the newness of her voice, the way that she tries out every word she hears then giggles at the attempt. Then there are moments when whole tidal waves of words tumble out of her mouth.
Did you catch those, mama?
I wish I did, sweetheart. You're still learning to speak; I'm still learning to hear you.
She is mama's little helper, always underfoot in the kitchen, tugging at my side, begging to see, to help, to "add it!", grinning up at me with her toothy smile. She is also daddy's little helper, chasing him around the yard, begging to sow the seeds and tug at the weeds. She loves to swing. And run and run.
She has the craziest hair imaginable. It floats and flies and whizzes around her head like so much fairy dust, impervious to gravity or a comb.
She loves the fancy cheese samples at Whole Foods. She will not eat anything with a "laughing cow" on it.
Despite my good intentions to limit her access to TV with all manner of free-range Waldorfian philosophies or hipster Montessori learning activities, she knows who The Wiggles are and she loves them. Most of her Wiggle-watching takes place on the iPhone. She figured out how to access my streaming Netflix account and uses it to watch The Wiggles and Caillou and Wallace & Gromit - that is, when she is not shaking her FuzziBunz to "Welcome to Atlanta" or Johnny Cash from my iTunes. How's that for self-direction, Montessorians?
Also, she recently managed to snap a photo (of her foot and flannel bed sheet) and upload it to my blog using the Typepad app on my iPhone - see previous post for evidence. I had no idea until it popped up on my Google Reader several hours later.
For twenty-two months, she has been our one and only, our greatest joy, and our wisest teacher. I hope I embraced every moment of our past two years as a threesome, even on those days that little toddler fingers tap-tap-tapped at my patience or stretched my energy level or inhibited my ability to walk three feet in this house without tripping over a wooden block or a Hello Kitty.
Because any day now, everything will change. Again. Scary, beautiful, dizzying, heart-expanding, life-embracing change.