There's been a lot of chaos in our lives recently. If your view of us is shaped entirely by this blog, you could be forgiven for assuming that this is Olive's doing; it's a reasonable assumption. It is not, however, correct. Christina's about to start a new job next week, and in order to get within commuting range of that new job, we've moved.

Back in the Army, the whole process seemed relatively simple, but it turns out that they'd been smoothing over quite a few rough edges the entire time. Also, being single helped: doing things with a family makes it all more complicated again. The upshot is that almost all of our free time for the past several months went into this: first househunting weekends, then the holidays, then the move itself, and then the long slow process of unpacking.

Olive certainly doesn't mind having moved, which is great¹. Presumably next time we move, she'll be much moodier about the whole thing; for now, though, she's just happy that there are now playgrounds even closer to home than before.

Because of everything that's been going on--we had holidays recently too, and a vacation to Greece--we haven't been writing much about Olive. That doesn't mean that she's been sitting static, though. It just means that now I have to look back and give some of the highlights since I've last written.

• She's figured out how to really run, and she's delighted with it; she likes to make an unstructured vocalization as she goes and let the impact of each footstep punctuate the airflow, so as she goes along she's effectively saying "wow-wow-wow-wow-wow". It's a goofy, inefficient toddler run for now, but I doubt it will stay that way for long.
• Her upper canines have broken through, her lower canines are about to break through, and her rear molars are starting to put a pressure on the gums. We'd actually expected the canines a while ago, because her first batch of teeth all came though at the earliest possible moment on the pediatric dental chart; canines were predicted from 15 months on. This is still a normal time for them to appear, though, so I suppose she was just taking a break from teeth for a while before beginning the next big push.
• She's decided that it's time for toilet training: she'll grab her diaper, say "pee pee" or "ah ah"², fetch her potty, and demand to be undressed to sit on it. The real breakthrough Christina and I are looking forward to is when she starts doing these things before elimination; until then, she just sits for a few seconds on the potty, then gets bored and runs away diaperless to pee on the floor somewhere.³
• She has invented the art of the tantrum: when she gets upset, she'll twist around until she's impossible to hold, then be furious at you for putting her down. Toddlers in general get more furious than anyone else, and she refuses to let herself get behind her peers in any aspect of development. As such, things occasionally get volcanic when we say things like "ok, you've been on Youtube for half an hour, so we're turning it off now."
• On the flipside, she's starting to develop her own sense of self to the point when she can sometimes realize that she's tired. This is great news, because she doesn't just start crying on these occasions anymore. It does, however, mean that she might just quietly lie down on the floor for a while, no matter where we are or what the situation is.
• She's developing the instinct that if a thing can be climbed, it should be climbed, at least once--and most things can be climbed. While she's not yet ready to tackle most of the big-kid obstacles at the local playground without help, she's fearless in attempting them if we're holding her hands. Nothing at home is exempt⁴ from her exploration, though most of the time, she's just really happy to be able to climb onto a grown-up's chair, drink from their water glass, and climb down, all by herself.
• Her vocabulary continues to grow⁵; at this point, it's pretty clear that the limiting factor isn't her understanding of words in general or her active vocabulary, but the actual phonemes in play. Just this afternoon, she was trying very hard to label a fish, but because the leading "f" and trailing "sh" are both difficult for her, she was just pointing and hissing.

Two months ago, I said that there wasn't a whole lot to speak about, just a bunch of incremental improvements. Now, it feels like there's a ton to speak about and no hope of chronicling it all. She's come into focus a bit more, made some definite steps forward on that gradient from "toddler" to "small child".

Most nights, a few hours after her bedtime, Olive wakes up, unhappy to be alone; she cries a little, just enough to ensure that someone comes to her. These days, I often don't even need to pick her up anymore to soothe her; I can just lie down with her, sing her bedtime song⁶, and be confident that she'll be asleep by the time I finish the fourth verse. She's getting bigger and cleverer and more competent all the time, which makes it all the more poignant when she chooses to be calmed by my mere presence.