However, within a few days, she wanted back into her own room again, and has stayed there ever since.   I think that means it’s been a whole week in a row now?

Getting her to sleep is getting easier, as well.  I wouldn’t say easy, she still would obviously prefer to stay up!  But she doesn’t fight staying in bed.  She squirms and fidgets and fusses a bit, but never tries to get up and leave.  She’s completely co-operative as far as getting ready for bed and getting into bed — it’s just the falling asleep part she resists!

Most nights it has ended up being daddy who stays with her until she falls asleep.  When I stay with her, she sometimes just wants to nurse, and (sadly, I confess, with some sense of guilt but knowing I need it for my sanity) I’m deliberately weaning her from the bedtime nurse.  She will usually accept a glass of milk instead, and/or merely holding the booby (what a lifesaver that trick has been!), but sometimes she’s still just too wound up when it’s mommy around.

Of course, the occasional evening when daddy gives up on her EVER settling down, so I go in to take a shift — she settles for me practically instantly, leaving him shaking his head in bewilderment over my magic mommy powers.

And that’s how it generally goes… she fidgets, fusses, squirms, kicks, rolls, chatters, plays, and then as soon as she settles and stays still for more than about 5 seconds, she is OUT.  Asleep, off to dreamland, dead to the world, just like that.

She will stay in her room until anywhere from 1am until 7am, but usually joining us sometime between 3-5am, after going to sleep around 9-9:30pm.  After the adventure of her heading downstairs looking for us one night early on, we invested in a nice pressure-mounted baby gate to block off the bedroom hallway once we all go to bed.  Most nights she comes in to our room on her own, occasionally she wakes us up with a single cry — just enough to alert us to her state of wakefulness and await our arrival to rescue her.  She is not scared to wake up alone, not since the first night or two when it was new and unfamiliar.

Her bed in our room has quickly turned into a storage area for laundry waiting to be sorted, and a favourite nesting spot for the cats.  One more week of this, however, and we will move it into her room… the final step in the grand process of her achieving Nighttime Independence.

Well, technically I guess you could say the final step is when she stays in her room all night, every night, and even takes herself to the bathroom (usually she tells us when she comes in that she needs to pee so we just do a quick potty with the BBLP) and back to her own bed… But those are all things she will just do on her own at some point, and there’s not much we can do to either accellerate or delay it.  Moving her “real” bed into her bedroom is the last concrete thing that we need to do.

Just thinking about it, it feels so final, so like an ending.  But really, it’s a beginning, as she takes another big step leaving babyhood and entering true childhood.  And she will always be welcome back into our bed, whensoever she needs it.

Pomme has become fascinated with weather and day/night recently.  Every morning, she asks if the sun is up, and bedtime is becoming easier because she has associated “sun is down” with “time for sleep.”  She’ll be merrily playing away, we’ll tell her it’s time to get ready for bed, and she resists.  But if we say “look, the sun is down!” she will look at the window and reply, “Oh!  The sun is down!” and will co-operatively — if not entirely happily — come along to get ready for bed.

It’s also been raining a lot lately.  Lately?  All summer, and now into fall, really.  “Oh, it’s raining outside!  I need my rubber boots!”  “Oh, sun is out now!”

I can’t wait until she gets a load of snow!  Of course she’s seen it before, and she knows what it is, but her level of awareness is just orders of magnitude higher than last year.

I don’t have pictures to post yet since I haven’t actually made the chart yet, just saved and printed it so far.  You can see pictures for yourself at the blogs linked to above.  Basically, it just says “The weather today is:” with a space to add the right weather symbol:  cloudy, raining, sunny, snowing, thunderstorm, etc.  You leave the chart on the fridge and add magnets to the symbol pieces.

I can already imagine Pomme getting up in the morning and running straight to the window to check today’s weather and place the appropriate magnet.  Off to the craft store we go!  (Um, we need some magnets hehe…)

I guess saying her first “representational drawing” isn’t 100% accurate, because she has been drawing “with intent” for awhile.  She has drawn rough oval shapes, thrown speckles into them, and said “whale!”

But this was different.

Tonight, she said “draw mommy.”  She drew a small circle.  Put a few dots inside the circle, then a curved line as well.  Then two long (very, very long) lines coming off the circle.  “There, mommy!”

Then she did it again, just beside the first one.  “Two mommies!”  She eventually drew six mommies, each like the other — a circle, a couple dots for eyes and a curved mouth, then two long legs (mommy is, after all, indeed very tall).

Then to top it all off, she added some speckles to the very end of the legs of one of the mommies and said “toes!”  Then she scribbled some more over top of the toes, and said “socks on it!”

Maybe I can get a scan of it…

Don’t want to take my word for it?  Have a look for yourself.  Here she is cuddlin Gunther the “orange cat”, who she used to just call “owan tat” and now calls “peu peu”, which apparently is the closest she can get to “Gunther”.

See what I mean?

Not convinced?  Here is how we came across her this morning.  Flipper walked by the bathroom and saw her in there.  She goes through phases of increasing demands for independence.  For a time, she only wanted to use her little green potty, then only wanted to use the big toilet with the cushioned seat insert and her little step stool to get up there.  And of course, she had to put the insert in all by herself (”DO IT SELF!!”) and push the stool into just the right place, which usually meant that by the time she’d got it all organized, she’d pee herself just as she was climbing up onto the stool and starting to pull down her pants.

Well, no more of that.  Now she skips all that ‘baby stuff’ and goes right to it.  I swear to you, this is exactly how we found her, she had no assistance in any part of this.

Yup, just sitting there doing her thing.  Number two, in fact.  And the book?  H.P. Lovecraft, of course.

So by now you’re saying, sure, she does cute things, but is she, y’know, truly cute, as in, to look at?

Exhibit three, pigtails.

I mean, come on.  That’s a face begging for a magazine cover.

Okay, I’m just supremely chuffed that she finally does have enough hair to put into pigtails.

She loves them, gets very excited about them, then about five minutes later, pulls them out.  How do you get toddlers to keep their hair up???

See?  There she goes.

Well, I’d like to conclude this argument for Cutest. Baby. Ever. with a final montage of Pomme at her domestic best.  I’ll mention at this point that she made the hot dogs for lunch pretty much completely by herself, putting the weiners in the pan, turning them over with tongs, removing them and putting them into the buns.  But I didn’t get any pictures of that.  What I did get is a documentary of her latest discovery… she can reach the kitchen faucet.  And therefore, she does the dishes.

Well, I rest my case.  Cutest Toddler Ever, both in appearance and in action.  So what do we win?

There is very little that we have actually ‘taught’ her.  She knows lots of things, of course, including some “academics,” but for the most part it is things she has simply absorbed.  Things that we have more directly “taught” are always under her direction — repeated as she insists, dropped when she wants to move on.  And so she is learning the alphabet and numbers from wooden puzzles (and still identifies the digit ‘3′ as “cat!” since the puzzle shows 3 cats under the puzzle piece), and can count ‘by rote’ to 10, and count groups of objects accurately up to about 4.

But most of her “learning” is in practical areas, and this is most definitely from following her lead.  She demands to learn how to do things.

Following Montessori’s admonitions of letting children do things and not interfering, she is allowed to do many things not normally thought of as toddler activities.  I have learned to allow for the extra time for her to accomplish something, rather than feel a need to hurry her along by helping out.  I have also learned to stand back and let her make mistakes, and watch amazed as she figures it out without my diving in to ’save’ her… or, if she cannot yet puzzle it out, she will calmly come to me and ask for my help.  And so I meet her only where she needs help, and not just where I assume she needs help.

And so before she was 26 months old, she was able to almost completely dress herself.  She sometimes gets her pants on backwards, and has a little trouble with shirts sometimes.  But she can pick out a complete outfit, underwear, socks, and all, and get herself ready independently.  And if you dare try to help her before she’s truly in need — watch out!

Some of her non-typical toddler activities include household things like vaccuuming, folding laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and drying dishes.  She is allowed to cut paper with scissors and slice cheese.  And she even helps me at the stove, stirring macaroni, turning hot dogs, mixing scrambled eggs.  Before we even get to the stove, she insists on helping to measure and pour ingredients, mixing and stirring it together… and cracking eggs!

So I’m sharing this video I took of her cracking eggs into a bowl the other day when we were making a white chocolate layer cake.  She actually cracked 3 eggs this time, I only caught the 3rd on video.  The first few times she helped with the eggs, a few weeks ago, she got a few little bits of shell.  Now she’s perfect every time.  She even puts away the empty shells and returns the carton to the fridge when we’re done. 

She had received Melissa and Doug’s clock shape puzzle for Christmas… or her birthday.  I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember which.  I think it was her birthday.  (Her birthday is only 2 weeks before Christmas so hopefully I can be forgiven!)

The shapes are the same 12 shapes.  They’re a bit smaller in the clock puzzle, and of course have big numbers printed on them, but it is the same set of shapes.

So I put it all together.  Shape puzzle pieces on the matching cards, clock puzzle pieces on top of the shape puzzle pieces.

First of all, I just thought this was COOL.  But I also had to think “educationally” so… this teaches that a shape is a shape whatever the size… which, admittedly, she already understands because she loves to draw and point out “GIG ty-goh” (that’s “big triangle”) as well as little ones.

It teaches coordination and dexterity, to place the smaller one on top of the larger.  Which she can do and has other tools already that practice the same skill… It teaches size differentiation, to determine which is the smaller one…. which she can already do.  Um, how about, colour doesn’t affect shape either?  Oh I know, we could use it to talk about colours, “put the red triangle on top of the… oh, both triangles are red, aren’t they… okay, put the green rectangle on top of the… oh right, the other rectangle is missing…”

It introduces the written words for shapes, therefore concepts of early literacy, letters, sounds, etc, as well as the verbal words for the shapes.  But it did that before I added the second set of shapes.

Um… so…

I guess it’s just cool.

So tonight she was spinning.  She’s been obsessed with watching ballerinas on Youtube lately.  “Bina!  Bina!” she demands.  And “Pin!  Pin!” when they pirouette endlessly.  I found some videos of toddlers dancing to a video called “Bella Dancerella Ballet Studio“, which comes with a toddler-sized barre, mat, and tutu.  It looked perfect for her.  Of course, a bit of googling finds that it’s no longer in production… except for Barbie, Disney Princess, and High School Musical versions.  Um, no.

So there she was, spinning.  She discovered that if she took one of her pull toys (a big wooden one in fact) and held it by the string, it would spin with her, and quite violently.  She spun wildly with it and clonked daddy in the leg.  Now, realize here that this is a child who has rarely, truly been told “no”.  I mean, she’s heard the word plenty, she’s been corrected like “no, that doesn’t go there, that goes here”.  But only rarely has she heard it in the authoritarian sense of “NO.  You must STOP.”

For one thing, she wasn’t old enough to truly understand.  But… she’s getting there now.  She turned two almost a month ago, and it’s very obvious to us how much she understands about the world and how it works.  It’s very frightening, it’s very humbling, it’s very awe-inspiring how much she understands about the world and how it works.

So she heard it tonight.  “NO.  That hurt daddy.  You cannot spin with that toy like that.”  Of course, she’s in full giggle, so I even had to do the get-down-to-her-level thing, gently cup her face in my hand to make sure I had her attention, and repeat it staring her right in the eye.

She processed this for a moment.  Then walked over to daddy.  Oh how cute, was she going to apologize?

“Move, daddy!” she said, while pushing him out of the path of danger.  Then she started spinning again.

What could we say?  She’d resolved the problem, eliminated the obstacle preventing her from spinning with the toy.  It was flawless logic, toddler-style.