18 months. One and a half.

The fruit trees are blooming. Sunday became Monday, and winter became spring, like that. A quiet explosion, hanging all cheery and sweet over the streets. Our city is coy. It tortures you with the months of rainrainrain greygreygrey, until the days are like waking dreams, everything seems muffled in wool, and pretty much nothing but espresso (pulled short) can pierce through the doldrums. You sometimes want to stick a pencil in your eye, for wanting the sun.

And then! Apple blossoms! (Or are they plum, or what?) The trees seem to flutter their eyelashes and say, "Wha'? What's the big surprise? We're all dressed up and ready to play, don'tcha know." People bounce along, walk their dogs, shout out "Good morning! Fine day!" No joke, you guys. This really happens. I wouldn't be surprised if Dick Van Dyke went whistling by on his way to making magical chalk drawings in the park.

The point being, Nora is 18 months old. It's spring again, and here we are with a little girl who speaks in two word phrases, knows her way to auntie's house, and pulls apart the furniture.

Her vocabulary grows in direct inverse proportion to our speechlessness. She tells us what's what, and we're struck dumb. How does she know that? Where did she learn that? Will she fire us if we refuse? Parental insubordination works mostly because we're bigger, and can lift things higher than she can reach.*

Nora has a specific sweetness about her, a gentleness and a sparkle, an inner joy. She is so gentle with her baby cousin. She is precise - enunciating her words, intent and focused in her play. We can say something like, "Nora? We're going on a walk, so get your purple shoes. They're in your bedroom." And she will (and then she'll bring us ours, unasked for. We're old and too slow.) She dances on tiptoes across the living room. She makes faces at us during dinner, and giggles. She pats her belly once, both hands, when she's accomplished something, grinning and tucking her chin down with a "Hm!"

Remember that muppet skit with Grover, where he practices "near" versus "far" by running far away from the camera and then back again? It sounds like that at our house, all day, like a tiny elephant coming and going, crescendo to decrescendo. The "thump thump THUMP THUMP!" of her feet, running and running.

She continues to love her books, and will find a little nook in which to sit - like behind the armchair - where she fits just right. She'll turn each page carefully, looking and looking, sometimes whispering to herself.

She is determined and willful and sometimes loud.

She loves her music class songs (which make us want to get out that pencil, again) and ... uh ... Bob Marley.

She loves it when daddy bounces her on the bed.

She loves it when mama crawls into her tent, where they lie with their heads side by side on Bobo the Hippo and read The Big Red Barn. And she HATES the page with the lowing cows. Have we mentioned her longstanding fear of cows?

If she wants something we're eating, she opens her mouth, sticks out her tongue, and points at it. No mistake there.

Shall we go on? Probably not. Let us close by saying that we're incredulous and humbled and tickled and tired and thrilled to belong to Nora. Happy 18 months, Beeboo ... happy one and a half, Chicken.



*(Not really. We're doing OK on the parenting thing. Trying to figure out what our lines are. Employing the "safe-respectful-kind" filter in those moments of indecision. Must pass all three. She's begun the maddening and perplexing behavior of giggling when we say no. Oh dear.)