"Oh, what a cute girl you have! How old is she?"

"Two."

The calendar doesn't agree: officially, it's still two months until she turns two. However, Olive doesn't act like a one-year-old, and it seems clumsy and overly specific to tell people that our kid is barely twenty-two months old, so Christina and I have been just inflating her age a bit. Sometimes we remember to qualify things with an "almost".

What's prompted this, though? It's no one thing, but a combination of a bunch of tendencies. It's that she speaks first now, when she wants something, even if she has to make up some words when she doesn't know the ones we'd prefer she use for a concept. It's that she keeps getting bigger, stronger, more dexterous; things that she remembers being impossible are now routine. It's that she's starting to explore the possibilities of tantrums as a tool for modifying the behavior of her parents. It's that her daycare mom reports that when another kid lies down crying, she'll go over and ask "you ok?"

We all went to the swimming pool this afternoon. Unfortunately, the day wasn't quite as warm as had been forecast when we made this plan, so the air temperature was around 22 (72 F) and the water temperature was only 19 (66 F). Bracing, if you like that kind of thing. Olive, being well-experienced in baths, walked the entire circuit of the area, testing each pool, convinced that at least one of them would be properly warm! If we'd gone earlier in the day, when the indoor section was open, she would have found what she was looking for. Instead, she had to wait until much later in the evening, when she had a bath at home. There, she splashed, and played, and poked her toes out of the bubblebath for the giggles; it was quite clear that this was the water experience she'd really wanted today.

Olive's language acquisition continues to startle us; she's constantly coming out with words that neither Christina nor I have ever heard from her before. One of her more endearing traits at the moment is that she repeats for emphasis, and alternates languages just to ensure that whoever's listening understands. "More bownie! More! Mehr! More!" Written down, it seems kind of imperious, but in person is's actually pretty likely to succeed, so I can't fault her for using the tactic.

It's fun to hear her generalize. For the moment, just about all berries are "boo-berry." There are exactly three kinds of drink: water, "coke" (anything dark), and "joos" (anything light). All utensils are "poon". Widening the focus, she'll sometimes launch into a complex sentence containing several words, one or two of which are in English or German, and the rest of which are probably her impressionistic guess at what fluent speech sounds like. I'd call it glossolalia, except it's actually more language-like than that. She is desperate to communicate with us, and delighted when she succeeds in it.

One fun consequence of her increasing vocabulary is that we can reverse roles when reading picture books together. Instead of just labeling the random assortment of items for her, I can now go through asking "what's that? What's that?" She'll always give some kind of answer, though when she doesn't know the answers tend to be brief nonsense syllables. She knows almost 50% of the words now, though, which definitely feels impressive. Also, she does the same in German with her mom.

None of this is "one-year-old" behavior. She met a one-year-old recently in the park, and the contrast was startling: the younger girl crawled around, observing grinningly, but didn't really do a whole lot. Olive tried a bit to play with the younger kid, but also wandered around, made sand ice-cream-cones and served them to anyone who would play along, climbed onto the stonework around the sandbox, climbed a ladder and slid down a slide. She actively engaged in playing with everything in that playground, while the younger kid was still figuring out the world and her place in it. I don't mean to say that there was anything wrong with the one-year-old, just that it would feel like a miscategorization to put her and Olive. It's simpler to just say, when asked, that she's two.

Ish.