I haven't been writing much recently, but it doesn't mean that Olive's somehow become uninteresting. The opposite, really: she's better than ever at expressing herself verbally, and she's kind of hilarious. However, it's a transition: as an infant, as a young toddler, I could talk about new things she learned to do, without having to refer to any specific incident. These days, there aren't very many new physical capabilities; her growth is all mental, as she learns to communicate. The anecdotes, more and more, have to be about specific incidents. I'm kind of bad at reporting on those.

That said, there are still a few new behavioral anecdotes which don't need to be about specific things. For example: she's recently hit the phase where the healing power of Band-aids holds a powerful fascination. Despite her interest in them, her cruel, stingy parents wouldn't just give her an unlimited supply of them to play with. Very shortly after she internalized that, her rate of bumps and abrasions suddenly went way up. Now, I'm not saying that she's hurting herself for the opportunity to wear a bandaid, it does feel like her tolerance for personal risk is suddenly a lot higher than it had been. She's had legitimate opportunities to wear a bandaid at least once a day for the last week. Her limbs look like hell, but she's a tough girl; she doesn't complain about things like that.

Another of her favored activities these days is telling us stories of things that have happened recently. Sometimes these stories are trivial: as I'm walking out of her bedroom in the evening, I often hear her telling Christina "Daddy said 'good night'!". Other times, it's a bit more impressive. Last week, she told me the story of how we'd had ice cream for dessert the previous evening, and how after she'd finished her own, she wheedled some more out of Christina. "I used my words! I said: 'Pleeease!'"

She also keeps telling us about an incident from over a month ago now: we were on the train from Berlin, and the conductor gave her a paper ticket that she could redeem for a toy in the dining car. She and Christina did that, and in exchange she got a toy train¹. She loved getting the toy, but couldn't understand the nature of exchange; she had grown weirdly attached to the ticket. Almost every day she reminds us: "my ticket is gone!"

Honestly, what impresses me the most right now about her speech is how thoroughly she's grasped recursive grammar in both languages. Perhaps it shouldn't impress me; her peers seem to be at about the same level right now. Still, it's a huge contrast to a year ago, when she was still kind of just throwing a sequence of nouns out there and hoping for the best.

Not everything is absolutely ideal, of course. Another of her recent discoveries is how startlingly effective it can be, when she doesn't want to do something, to just throw herself down on the floor in a lump and refuse to cooperate with attempts to get her up. When she's really emotional about her refusal, which is often these days, this behavior is coupled with tears and whining. Christina and I are trying to walk the line such that we're neither heartless tyrants who never listen, nor easily enough persuaded that we encourage behavior like that. One of the fun bits of parenthood is that we'll only find out if we're doing the right thing, right now, in about a year.

Still, overall, Olive is happy, healthy, and brings joy to the house. We've been very lucky with regards to the covid crisis so far, and we have every reason to expect to continue to be.

My goal for the moment: write here again before she turns 3.