Well, it’s now permanent.  On October 11, we asked her if she’d like her bed moved into her room, and she most excitedly said yes.

Pictures and more details after the jump:

Here’s her bed on its way out of our room.  It had previously been in the corner just behind it.  At this point when the pic was taken, I had already moved the chair into the corner and pushed the dresser over a bit — which was necessary in order for there to be enough space to get the bed out the door!

All the laundry everywhere had been piled up on her (unused for nearly 2 weeks) bed, and has since been put away.  Honest.

Taken apart, the bed makes its way easily into her room.

Here it is all moved into place and made up.  One big advantage of the move is that this bed has a smaller footprint than the floor mattress did.  So she now has more floorspace, as well as underbed storage!

Pomme christens her new sleeping arrangements by jumping on the bed, of course.  In high heels, no less.

One last pic, the bed is now all made up and properly covered and surrounded with stuffed toys and dolls.

We love this bed, it’s an Ikea Kritter.  It’s larger than a typical toddler bed, but smaller than a twin size.  So it’s great for a toddler, great for saving space, but is still big enough to last her well into childhood.  The only real drawback of it is, in fact, its unusual size.  Only Ikea’s own sheets fit — and we only have the fitted sheets.  We use no top sheet at all for now, and we have to fold a twin-sized comforter in half and place it sideways, or else stuff all the extra comforter down the back.

Still, it’s a small price to pay, it’s such a great bed otherwise.

As for her sleeping itself?  Well, I have to say it’s mostly good news.  There are, of course, nights where she still takes hours to go to sleep, fussing and whining the whole time, while hubby and I take turns sitting with her.  And there are nights where she drifts gently off to sleep while we’re still reading a story.  Most nights are somewhere in the middle.  She’s generally calm, but squirms and fusses quite a bit when it’s actually time to settle down to sleep.  Until she holds still for a few moments, then she’s out like a light.

But, even with rough nights where she just doesn’t want to actually sleep, she has never, ever, tried to just keep getting out of bed, or whine that she doesn’t want the bed in her room, or cry that she wants to sleep in our room instead.

These problems seem to mostly be in the realm of the child who has been made to sleep in their own room since birth.  I won’t be so presumtuous as to say it never happens with co-sleeping “graduates.”  But I do think it’s not an unreasonable observation, that children who have had their needs for dependence and security at night met in infancy and toddlerhood, and not rushed into sleep independence, are therefore more secure and confident when the time actually comes.  The need, once filled, is no longer an issue.

On the other hand, babies made to sleep independently from the beginning, often with “cry-it-out” methods, learn that bedtime is a scary time, a confrontational time, a battle of wills between parents and child, a time of parental withdrawal and abandonment.  As soon as they’re old enough to “fight back”… well, they do.  Over-generalization?  Maybe.  But often seen.

It was actually hubby who realized she was up.  She didn’t cry this time.  What he heard was footsteps — going downstairs.  He got up to check, and sure enough, she had gone down the hall, squeezed past the barrier we’d set up (since we don’t have a gate we had just put up a large box, as a deterrent/reminder rather than a full out barricade), through the kitchen, and all the way downstairs.  As soon as she saw him, she started crying.  I guess pent-up nervousness released when daddy came to the rescue.

There is some logic to her going downstairs.  Often, if she goes to bed early and wakes up before we’ve gone to bed, she’ll come looking for us downstairs… because that’s where we are.  So I don’t believe she was sneaking downstairs to play.  I think she just didn’t realize that we were in bed, and was heading down to look for us.  The fact that all the lights were out didn’t register as important to her toddler’s brain, apparently.

So that was the second night.  Still mostly successful, although she had still protested bedtime quite vehemently and taken a long time to settle down.

That brings us to last night.  This time, when we first suggested that it was bedtime, she protested again — but quite quickly said “okay” and agreed to come get ready without any more fuss!  We asked her if she wanted to sleep in her own room or in mommy and daddy’s room, and she answered, “No!  I don’t want to sleep!”  Heh.  An honest answer!   But that was as far as the protesting went.  We then said to her “I know you don’t want your day to end, but the sun is down and it’s time to go to sleep.  Which room would you like to sleep in?”  She answered her own room.

A significant difference about last night was that we started the routine in her own room and bed right away.  The first night, the move to her room was after a good half hour or so of her struggling in her bed in our room, and her request to move was a complete surprise, totally out of the blue.  The second night, we were about to put her into her bed in our room but she protested that she wanted her room.  The third night was the first time her preference was made clear before the bedtime routine even started, so we began the whole procedure with that in mind, rather than as an uncertainty or a surprise.

Now that all of us — parents included — are starting to get the hang of a routine that works for her, it was getting easier.  She wasn’t happy about getting her teeth brushed, but cooperated.  She peed on the toilet happily.  She actually climbed into bed willingly, with a smile.  We read a book together.  She wanted to read it again, but I declined, saying once was enough because it was time for sleep, and she said okay!  She had a glass of milk and asked for more, but once again we told her it was enough, and once again she said okay!

And then she settled down, almost right away.  A little bit of squirming, a little chatting with her dolls, but no actual fussing, no whining, no kicking or crawling upside down.  She stayed lying down, cuddled up in her blankets. Daddy lay down with her, and she wanted me to just sit beside the bed.  She had a little whispered conversation with daddy, about how there are lights in every room in the house.  Then daddy said “time to sleep, no more talking”, she said “okay”, and in three long slow blinks, she was asleep!

Hurray for such a calm, peaceful, and happy transition to sleep!  That’s about the first time ever, at least since she became aware of the fact that sleep=no more play.

She ended up sleeping until 3am, so not her record, but she did come straight into our room this time, without any crying either.  Nursed straight back to sleep and slept until 8:30 this morning.

We’ve decided that if she chooses to sleep in her room for two weeks straight, then that will indicate a likely permanence to this new location, and we’ll move her “real” bed into her room (which is actually a little smaller than the mattress on the floor and has storage space underneath, so she’ll have more room in her room!) and move the mattress into our room for awhile, for “just in case”.

Yesterday was also her very first dance class ever, and she just proved yet again how she’s turning into such a big girl.  But that’s another post…

Backstory:

She has a bed in our room.  We co-slept since birth, then around 14mo we added a sidecarred bed for her to start the night in.  We moved it across the room just a few months ago, when she was about 2.5yo.  She gets up and joins us in our bed about 25-30% of the time, the rest of the time now she sleeps all night in her bed — even resettling herself sometimes after sitting up awake in the night.

She’s also had a floor bed in her own room since we moved into this house a year ago. We used to use it for naps, just to get her used to the idea of sleeping in there, but she hasn’t had regular naps for a long time. When she does nap these days, we’ve just put her in her bed in our room.

We’ve been working on giving her a real ‘bedtime routine’ lately.  Up until recently, we would just nurse her down or wear her and go for a walk, when we saw that she was getting tired.  Now that she’s getting older, though – she’s 33 months – she’s become more resistant.  She wants to fight sleep, she wants to stay up and do stuff.  Nursing to sleep doesn’t always work anymore, and she’ll refuse to go in the sling because she knows what it means.

We found that we were staying up past midnight (we’re night owls so that in itself wasn’t a problem), with an overtired, cranky child who then was even harder to get to sleep.  So it was time to start a real “bedtime routine”, at a time when we thought she actually was tired but before she got overtired.

So around 8:30, we put on her pj’s, brush her teeth, maybe read a book, then go lie down in her bed in our room.  This last was especially a new part — normally we just let her go to sleep wherever, usually in our arms, and then plop her into her bed once she’s down.  Seriously, “plopping” best describes it.  I could practically throw her into bed and at most, she’d stir, shift, shuffle, and settle.

But with the previous nursing to sleep and cuddling no longer being a guarantee, it was time to ‘graduate’ to actually going to sleep in her bed!

She took to it quite quickly, with relatively little drama — at first.  Some nights, I nursed her down in her bed.  Other nights, we just cuddled.  She was usually upset at having to go to bed, but would settle within 5-10 minutes and drift off to sleep.

Then I decided I was ready to get rid of the bedtime nursing… it didn’t work for sleeping, in fact it tended to keep her awake, and I found it very irritating.  I’m trying so hard to let her self-wean, go as long as she wants to, and we’ve made it farther than I did with Flipper (I had weaned him just around 2.5yo) but I’m afraid that I’m hitting my limit.  I actually don’t mind middle-of-the-night nursing, but the bedtime one was time to go.  I knew that she didn’t really need it to get to sleep, there were so many nights that we didn’t use it at all, so it was just a matter of having that happen every night.

The first night that I actually refused (promising we’d nurse later), she took it well, just held the boob instead.  The second night, she cried.     That heartbroken cry.  We cuddled, I consoled, daddy cuddled, and she did eventually settle.  It actually wasn’t too bad – if she hadn’t settled quickly I would have let her nurse.  But she was okay.  She expressed her disappointment, then accepted the alternatives.  It still took her a little while to settle, but what we’ve noticed is that as soon as she’s able to hold herself still for more than 5 seconds, she drops out cold.  So it’s simply a matter of sitting with her and reminding her to be still, until she settles enough to let herself sleep.

Well, that was last night.  Tonight, I was proactive and offered a glass of milk before we even got to that stage.  She drank it up eagerly.  Then the squirming stage started.  She’d lie down, but play with her dolls.  Or sit up to grab a book that had fallen beside the bed.  Or turn around to cuddle with daddy.  Or stick her bum up in the air.  Or fiddle with her blankets.

Then she said, “I want to sleep in my room.”

I wasn’t ready for this one.  I thought it was probably just another delaying tactic.  We’ve suggested it to her before, asked if she’d like to try sleeping in her room, and she always said ‘no’.  That’s fine, I knew she just wasn’t ready yet.  But, since she asked… we went with it — we told her that she had to settle and be still, or we’d just come back to our room. She said okay, so we went with it.

Well, it still took her a few minutes to settle, but she did. And she fell asleep.

I’m actually not quite sure how to feel about this.  On the one hand, it’s great!  My baby is growing up, she’s secure and independent, we have even more privacy in the bedroom, and of course it’s “proof” that nighttime attachment parenting does not mean that your child will still be in your bed when they’re in college!

On the other hand, it’s harder to keep an eye on her.  She might decide to get up and play (in fact, before we went to her room, I talked about what would happen if she woke up in the night – to make sure she understood she could come into our room. “What will you do if you wake up and you’re in your room?” “Play!”) — or go wandering through the house unsupervised.  She’s recently managed to open the front door, even when it’s locked.  We’ll probably get a deadbolt or chain lock to prevent unwanted escapes, but we haven’t done that yet.  I might not sleep as well, knowing that she’s in a completely separate room.  I’ll be half-awake all night listening for her!

I knew this would happen eventually.  I was even looking forward to it in many ways.  I just wasn’t expecting this yet.

Well, we’ll see how it goes tonight… 10 to one odds I’m getting up at 3am to go rescue her when she wakes up and starts crying because she’s in an unfamiliar environment… And we’ve put a big box across the hallway so she doesn’t go wandering through the house, because we don’t have baby gates anymore!

And who knows what will happen tomorrow night.  This might be a one-time event, not to be repeated until she’s 6.  Or it might be the start of a gradual shift, some nights here, some nights there.  Or it might be the beginning of a sudden change, and we’ll end up moving her nicer bed into her room.  I honestly have no idea.

Whatever happens, though, it’s okay.  We’ve followed her lead.  I moved her bed across the room when I sensed, from her sleeping patterns, that she was ready for it, and sure enough she started sleeping all night almost every night and had no problems toddling across the room to me when she did need me.  And now we’ve put her in her own room, not for our convenience, or out of some sense of needing to force independence on young children… but because she wanted to.  She was ready to try it, on her own schedule and her own terms.  Once again, she proves that young children desire independence and will even demand it when they’re developmentally ready, all we need to give is the opportunity and the freedom to try things.  No pressure, no games.

“What happened?  Oh?  Need a hug and kiss?  Sad bunny?”

Then she gave the bunny a hug and a kiss.

“There!  Happy bunny now!”

Grinning, she ran off, holding the bunny’s hand so it “ran” with her, saying “bunny run fast! Come on, bunny!”

Earlier, she had her 7yo cousin nursing the bunny.  What a crazy, adorable, wonderful kid!

I’m particularly looking forward to Home is Where You Start From‘s look at Homer’s Odyssey.  As I’ve mentioned, we’ve recently shifted to a Charlotte Mason style with my 10yo son, Flipper.  Into week 5 now and still liking it!  For history, we’ve been doing “introduction to history” things this session (each of our sessions is 6 weeks), looking at archaeology and what history means, as well as a wee bit on the earliest civilizations   Our next session will be Ancient Egypt, and I’m all planned up for that.  Following that, we’ll be taking a session on Ancient Greece, which I haven’t done too much planning for as yet.  I’ve heard about only a couple adaptations of the Odyssey for kids, so I’m very keen to check out all the great ideas in this post.

The Recession Depression Therapy blog has a post on Cookbooks for Kids, and I think I’ll have to search out the Little House inspired cookbook!   I’ve recently been exposed to Montessori’s teachings on little kids in the kitchen, and so my 2yo daughter Pomme helps me a great deal with food preparation.  But I was none so enlightened when Flipper was a wee boy, and boy oh boy it’s a struggle to get him interested in helping.  Or doing anything for himself.  “MOM!  I need you to butter my toast!” is a refrain heard far too often.  One trick that sometimes works is dangling the carrot that girls like boys who can cook… he’s only 10, but he’s already looking forward to finding a wife!  What works the very best, however, is one cookbook we have, a Company’s Coming cookbook for kids.  He’ll do absolutely everything by himself when he finds a dish in there he wants to try.  He even made breakfast for himself and his sister this morning, a toasted “cheesy apple melt.”  I’ll pass, thanks.

The Thinking Mother ponders about Self-Directed Learning Moments, and how not every “teachable moment” has to involve parental interference.  Once again, I find Montessori parallels… Dr. Montessori observed, very wisely I think, that parents and teachers should not automatically jump in and help, cheer on, encourage, enrich, advise, or otherwise interfere when a child is absorbed in something.  We want to help, it’s a natural impulse, but in fact we’re breaking their concentration.  Since learning this, I’ve found myself having to restrain my impulse to ‘jump in’ with Pomme fairly often (although like any habit, this has gotten much easier with practice), wanting to show her how to do something, or — even worse — just do it for her.  I’ve been gratified, amazed, and enlightened to see that when I just sit back and let her do her own thing, she’ll figure it out on her own.  Not only does this foster confidence and independence, but it’s practicing her own problem-solving skills.  Of course, if she gets frustrated and ASKS me for help, I will.  The idea is not to never help your kids.  It’s just to realize when they really do need help, and when they just need some time to work it out for themselves.

And finally, Dad’s Homeschool Blog sings the praises of StumbleUpon as a search tool for homeschooling resources. I’ve been using StumbleUpon myself for awhile, to help promote my articles at Eco Child’s Play as well as my little blog here.  I’ve also randomly stumbled through their listed sites, and have found some really amazing things.   I’m a bit annoyed right now, in fact, that my latest Firefox upgrade seems to have deleted my StumbleUpon toolbar, so now I have to go find it and install it again.  Such is life, I guess.

Savvy parents don’t try to separate their children from the care of their homes, they include them.  Rather than waiting until your child is asleep or being watched by another family member or distracted with shiny toys –  bring them in on the action!

After all, what better gift could you give to your children than the knowledge of how to look after a home? The typical toddler is hungry for independence and is keen to imitate everything they see adults doing.  They really, really love to help with housework, they truly crave knowledge and skills in regards to looking after themselves and their environments. Montessori philosophy recognizes this as a “sensitive period” for “order”, and in fact Montessori education for toddlers focuses on those very practical skills rather than “academic” ones: things like folding towels, washing dishes, pouring liquids and dry goods, sweeping the floor.

Certainly it would make sense to capitalize on this instinctive drive, this love for work, making household care a habit for them while they’re in a stage where they are so keen for it, rather than waiting until they are older and just hate “chores”!

My daughter Pomme just turned two years old a couple of weeks ago.  She puts her toys and work away when she is finished (most of the time), and puts them away in a very careful and orderly manner.   She empties the dishwasher and puts away the cutlery, and hands me the glasses and plates that she can’t reach. (I take out sharp things first). She helps set the table. She helps transfer the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Then she helps sort the clean laundry — she knows which clothes belong to whom, and will help organize it into piles, and then will carry it into the right rooms. She tries to fold towels (and doesn’t do too badly) and puts kitchen towels in the right drawers. She puts her own dirty clothes into the laundry room. She takes her dirty dishes to the sink. She has a shelf with some cutlery and dishes just for her and can get herself a drink of water. She cleans up her own spills with cloths or sponges. She helps sweep the floor. She vacuums the floors and gets mad if you try to vacuum without her! She even helps with cooking — she stands on a chair, wears an apron, and helps stir things, scoop flour, shake in spices, I’ve even let her (carefully supervised) do stuff at the stove, like turn frying hot dogs with tongs, or stir boiling pasta.

She loves every moment of it.  I never forced her to do any of this — I simply recognized her desire to be involved, and rather than consider her as being ‘in the way’ and send her away to do ‘kid stuff’, I enabled her to participate, gave her tasks she could accomplish, and watched what she was capable of doing on her own without any preconceptions of what she “should” be able to do.

Oh, of course there are times when she is just not in the mood to ‘help’.  If something absolutely must get done, then I will get her occupied (or wait until she occupies herself on her own) and do things then.   At this age, children do not need to be as constantly monitored as when they were younger, we just need to check in on them, keeping half an eye on them, even if they’re in the next room. When Pomme gets into some of her Montessori-inspired work, she will often be completely focused and absorbed in the activity for a good 20 minutes.

Or if she’s in a clingy mood, cranky and tired, I’ll put her in a sling. Whatever it takes to get things done.

The point is, however, that these are not the default, the ‘normal’ way of doing things in our house.  They are the fallbacks, what we do when the ‘normal’ way — her being involved — is not going to work.

This was not how I did things with Flipper when he was a toddler.  Today at ten years old, he cannot fold a towel or a blanket neatly.  He cannot hang up his clean clothes, or fold his shirts and put them away in an orderly fashion.  He is next to clueless with laundry.  He does not know how to sweep the floor or wash a glass.  Even a simple task such as wiping up a spill, or wringing out a wet washcloth, he has great difficulty with. His cooking skills are limited to a grilled cheese sandwich, and reheating things in the microwave.

And yes, I have tried to teach him.  But he is very resistant to learning any of these things.  I let it go for too long, believing that he was still ‘too young’ to be learning any household chores.  Instead, I missed the ‘sensitive period’ and now it is an arduous task — difficult both for me to teach, and for him to learn.

I thought that I was following him, I thought this was child-led: by not forcing him to do chores when he was ‘too young’ I believed that he would not build up resistance and would therefore be keen to help when he simply became old enough.  But I failed to recognize his instinctive drive at the correct time.  In effect, I ‘forced’ him to play instead and now that is all he wants to do.  His potential for absorbing these skills when he would have been receptive to them was never fulfilled.

As parents, sometimes we must let go of our preconceptions, which often are misconceptions, of what a young child “should” be able to do, and “should” be doing with their time (ie., only running around and playing with bright, shiny, fun toys).  They are in reality capable of so much more.  Give your toddler the chance to participate in your “adult” housework, and prepare to be astonished, both at the skill and at the joy and pride they show in so doing!

Of course every child is different.  But whatever their age, you can’t look at this as something that takes a certain amount of time to learn – unlike, for instance, potty training, which some research shows takes an average of 3 months whether you start at age 1 or age 4.

Young children are absorbing concepts of every kind of quality, pretty much from the moment they’re born. Smooth vs. rough, hot vs. cold, soft vs. hard, bright vs. dark, heavy vs. light, etc etc. Colour is just one of these sensory descriptive aspects of things.

Categorization and Language

Not only do our babies have to learn to recognize all these contrasting aspects in and of themselves, they also then have to sort out which labels apply to which type of aspect. For instance, say that you have a wooden ball which is blue, hard, heavy, and smooth. You say to the child “blue ball!” How does he know whether the sound-label “bloo” applies to the smoothness, the shape, the weight, the material, or the colour?

Of course, this all must take place after he already understands that the sound-label “ball” means this round object, and not one of its other physical characteristics.  Generally, “naming” labels (nouns) come to a child’s understanding before “descriptive” or adjective labels do.  This is by no means a hard and fast rule, however.   Whichever types of labels he is currently analyzing, however, even once he understands that there are these different types of aspects that he can differentiate and that can be labeled, he still has to categorize all the different sets of labels.

The label-set of colours is also a complex set.  Some attributes are labeled fairly simply, such as rough vs. smooth and light vs. heavy.  We generally identify these with only two different labels, and when there is gradation we refer to only “heavier” or “smoother”.  There is not a large set of words to label the different degrees of how rough or how heavy an object is.  Some sets are just slightly more complex, with “hot” and “cold” denoting easy-to-differentiate opposites, with a more subtle “warm” label occuring somewhere in between.  When there are clear opposites to work with, it is generally easier for a young child to determine the attributes being labeled.

Colour has no clear opposites.  Like the attribute set of “shapes”, rather than 2 opposite ends of a spectrum with gradients in between, it appears as whole set of discrete, individual descriptions.   (Of course as adults we understand that colour is indeed on a spectrum and each shades into the next, but our first understanding of colour is much more rigidly defined.)  The complexity of this label-set suggests that it is not at all unexpected for this to be one of the later categories for a young child to master.

What Parents Can Do To Encourage Colour Understanding

Now if you give a child that same ball mentioned above, and a soft, fluffy, blue sock with it, and then say “blue ball, blue sock”, he might then be able to recognize that the “bloo” label is the only thing that’s in common between the two objects, therefore it applies to the colour difference. Or, probably more likely, he stores that information away like a true scientist, taking it as his hypothesis that “bloo” means that particular colour, and then wait and test his hypothesis with a few more things before trying it out for himself.

This process is ongoing CONSTANTLY. So you can’t just say that they “start to learn” their colours at one point and then finish at another point. We only see the external manifestations of the learning process once they are already quite far along with it.

In general, once a child has successfully differentiated the “colour” attribute from other descriptive aspects, they will quickly learn all the colour labels/names. So once they have one or two colours, the rest will come pretty quickly. Usually, parents will assist this process when we can see that they’ve realized one or two colours, creating a kind of positive feedback loop, responding to their own externalizations of their categorizing efforts.  When they identify “blue”, we’ll start saying “yes, that’s a blue ball. And this ball is red, and this one is green.” Now that this child is certain we’re describing the ‘colour’ attribute, he is able to associate the other labels to the correct colours and it is now simply a matter of memorization — something babies and toddlers excel at quite naturally!

Colour Understanding – Wide Range of Normal

The age where this categorization successfully “clicks” varies tremendously from child to child, everything from 18months to 4 years is common and normal.   If one child is later in learning his colours, he might have been ‘early’ in identifying other attributes, and is just sorting them out in a different order than the child who learned their colours at a young age but didn’t understand “quiet” and “loud” until much older, for instance.  When we stop and consider the vast catalogue of attributes that a developing child must first recognize, then differentiate, then associate correct linguistic labels to, we should be much less concerned about the speed of acquisition of any particular labels, and more in respectful awe of the incredible absorptive intelligence of our youngsters!

Photo: Shewatchedthesky under creative commons

I guess first of all, I should come up with cute nicknames for my kids… I have observed that most ‘family’ bloggers refer to their kids as “Little Fish” or “Peanut” or “Pumpkin”, in order to maintain a certain sense of privacy.   Let’s see…

My 10-year-old son is energetic, hyperactive, distractible.  He’s quick to temper and prone to selfishness.  Yet he’s also a gentle soul who likes soft and cuddly things, he’s gregarious and kind to his friends, always laughing and full of jokes.  We think he has sensory issues and he has trouble sleeping.  He’s moderately gifted, but lazy.  He can build the most astonishing Lego creations, he will draw amazing pictures endlessly, he loves to read.  He loves the blues, idolizes Stevie Ray Vaughn, and is a master of Guitar Hero.  He has a junior black belt in karate and is now in Tae Kwon Do.  He’s a competitive gymnast.  He’s never been to school and has no interest right now in ever going.  He asks hard questions about life and fairness, and seems to alternate between the maturity of a grownup and a 4-year-old.  He has two main goals in life — to be a guitarist in a band, and to be a marine biologist.  He especially adores whales and dolphins, but is already an expert on anything under the sea.   Even his bedroom has an undersea theme, and he won’t eat fish because it makes him sad.

So then… he is “Flipper”.

Now my daughter is quite a different creature.  She will be two years old next week.  Her favourite things to talk about are shoes, cats, fish, dogs, cars, and colours.  She’s viciously independent, insists on doing things by herself, and insists on ‘helping’ mommy in the kitchen, with cooking, doing dishes, as well as other chores like doing the laundry and taking out the garbage.  She can be very loud and cantankerous, like any toddler, but on the whole, she’s actually fairly reserved, quiet, calm, and serious.  She was never “diaper-trained” and is now a “graduate”, virtually potty-independent.  She did “baby-led solids” and her favourite food is spicy Indian curry.  And potato chips.  Apples and bananas and pomegranates.  And, of course, mommy milk!  She is the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen, she looks like a porcelain doll.  She’s surprisingly petite given her parents… She’s the apple of her daddy’s eye.  Hm.  And her favourite undies are the ones with the apple on them, which she calls “apple bum”.

Maybe she can be “Apple”.  Not to be confused with Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s cute little girl of the same name…  No, even better.  She’ll be “Pomme”, like her yummy pomegranates (the word means “seeded apple,” by the way), and since I’m bilingual and we’re trying to work on French… and it just seems a wee bit classier.

So there we have it.  My bouncy, friendly, confusing Flipper, and my rosy, sweet and colourful Pomme.