We made fajitas for supper tonight, and while they would have been way too messy to give to Olive assembled, we let her sample all of the ingredients in isolation. What do you suppose her favorite was? Personally, I'd predicted the chicken, but in actuality she threw that straight on the floor. She wasn't really interested in the shredded cheese, the sour cream, the homemade guacamole. She ate some fried peppers, reluctantly, when she'd used up all of her favorite thing and it was clear that no more was coming.

What was her favorite thing? Mild salsa, Old El Paso brand, straight out of the jar: she begged for it until we just stuck a baby spoon in and started feeding it to her, and then she just kept eating it until the jar was empty.

This is all in keeping with her recent discovery that as a toddler, she just has more freedom than she did as an infant. Three days ago, she wanted to lean forward and take a sip of her bathwater? Sure, why not; she was being plenty careful about breathing. Today at the park, she wanted to go headfirst down the slide? I was there to catch her at the bottom, so what's the harm? This has led to some experimentation on her part to figure out just where exactly the limits are. Sometimes it's benign, and she just eats all the salsa for dinner. Sometimes we don't catch her intention quite quickly enough to stop her when we would have wanted to, such as when she just leaned down and headbutted the coffee table. Turns out that it hurts when you do that, and she didn't like it.

The important thing, to my mind at least, is to give her the freedom to make her own mistakes and learn from them. This is hard. It's easy to tell her no, that this sort of thing just isn't for kids your age. Sometimes we have to do this anyway, in the kitchen, or when she pickpockets some pills out of Christina's purse. Sometimes she just wants to roll off the changing table, no matter that she's naked in the middle of being changed, and we have to hold her down and at least get her rediapered despite all her protests. In fact, now that I think of it, it's easier to come up with examples of just telling her no than of letting her make her own mistakes.

Even so. Even if I'm not giving her all the freedom that she wants, I'm trying to give her all the freedom that she can handle.