Little EC has been doing so many new things recently, it’s tough to keep track of them all. She’s also so active that it’s tough to find any time to sit and put fingers to keyboard. But to summarize:

• Over the weekend, she used the toilet successfully for the first time. It’s a matter of catching her when she’s ready, but has not yet started…and because she’s quick, it hasn’t happened again.
• She finally got over whatever mental block was keeping her from opening the drawers in the kitchen…so all the knives and other sharp objects were quickly relocated.
• She’s repeating phrases with great facility now. “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Easter” weren’t even a stretch when their appropriate times came. Almost anything that we ask her to repeat, she’ll make an attempt at, and for three syllables or fewer, she’ll get it right (within her limitations) almost all of the time. (Her limitations still include, for the most part, non-existent “r” and “l” sounds.)
• She moved, suddenly one day about two weeks ago, to a one-nap schedule. It took about a week after that for her to realize that she needed to sleep for more than an hour during that nap in order to be a functioning toddler.
• The number of letters and numbers that she reliable recognizes has been increasing. We play a computer game where letters fall from the top of the screen, and she names them. She can repeat after the computer voice that names them 100% of the time, and there are several characters that she can reliably name herself.
• She also can mostly reliably name a couple colors: “purple” and “green”, for whatever reason, are the ones that she does best with. Yellow and red are both non-existent to her, it seems.
• She clearly has an intuitive grasp of both numbers and colors. While she plays with her blocks, I’ve noticed that she likes to make stacks of blocks that all have the same number of units (one-, two-, or four-bump-long blocks). And she color-codes them more often than not.
• She’s discovered the fun of throwing balls down the stairs. I’ve discouraged her from throwing other things down the stairs.
• She also has a proclivity for certain routines. Today I was washing some grapes and offered to give her some while she was standing next to me in the kitchen. She ran out, and with great effort and a not-insignificant amount of complaining, extricated her high chair from where I had left it in the dining room (while I cleaned the kitchen floor) and pushed it back to the counter where it belonged, then demanded to be put up. I would have given her the grapes and let her run around with them…but who am I to argue?

There are so many other little observations that are significant but that I can’t remember all in one sitting…I really must get better at making notes more regularly.