Olive's been toddling around for about two months now. I'd always thought that learning to walk was more or less a binary thing: either you could maneuver from one place to another without using your hands, or you couldn't. As it turns out, it's much more of a continuum: do you have a straight gait, or a bandylegged cowboy walk? Can you keep your balance walking across a mattress? What about over soft sand? Mostly, her answers to those questions are "yes", though she still has some sway in her steps.

The most recent development is that she understands now about dropping from ledges. This morning, she went to the edge of the bed, carefully hung her legs over the edge, psyched herself up a little, and then jumped off. She landed with a thump, fell forward, caught herself with her hands. She didn't like that at all, but aside from a short exclamation didn't fuss; it was clearly the result of her own actions. Instead, she turned around, climbed back onto the bed, and tried it again. She lost her balance again, but this time came closer to landing it.

I really like that! She doesn't fuss about minor things she did to herself, and she practices new skills over and over again, of her own initiative. Another that she's working on hard right now is proper running. She still tends to trip over her own feet when she gets them both off the ground simultaneously, but that can't last for too much longer with the intensity of her work on it.

That said, there are times when she's still really fragile. Christina and I attribute this to teething: a few times now, she's woken us at 0300 screaming, but quieted down immediately after applying some topical anesthetic to her gums. During the day she screams less, but there is definitely some occasional irritability which seems out of character for her.

At this moment she has three fully exposed molars, and one more which is just beginning to poke through. The next teeth on the schedule will be her canines, so hopefully with the completion of this molar we'll have a few months of peace. Then again, she's been popping teeth out at or a bit earlier than the chart predicts for all her teeth so far, so I wouldn't put it past her to have them already underway.

Her babbling is becoming quite remarkably speech-like. When she doesn't want something, she'll say "nehh", about 50% between "no" and "nein". Both Christina and I are "Ma!", and she's several times said "iunnoh" when intrigued by something. Can we truly say that she's speaking in either language as yet? Not quite, I think: there's still quite a bit of variability in her pronunciation, and she's not entirely reliable at using the few words we suspect of her. Still, I definitely think that she knows about the concept of speech as a mode of communication, and that she's picking up on the words we say, starting to really put together the pieces of their meaning.

She knows about gestures! She knows all about pointing to things of interest; she puts items in an outstretched hand, or takes them when offered. When she's thirsty, she'll reach for her water bottle; she signals quite clearly when she wants to be picked up or put down.

All told, she's entirely clear of babyhood, I think: toddler is the only word which correctly applies now. Things aren't always easy; her typical fluency only makes things more frustrating for everyone involved on the occasions when she fails to communicate something.

Still, it's remarkable: she actively cooperates when we dress her, and this feels like a huge leap forward, because it really wasn't all that long ago that she would scream and struggle at the temporary restriction of her mobility. She occasionally just shows up, grinning, beside my chair as I work, having temporarily escaped from Christina. Overall, she's become a very small, but very real and expressive person. More than ever, I'm looking forward to speaking with her, instead of just talking to her!