Dear Lucy,

This morning you repeatedly pushed the button on your Christmas globe (making the music play over and over and OVER), then grabbed your new stuffed Dora doll and danced around the living room with a delighted grin on your face.

This little routine completely encompasses 1 3/4+ years or 22 months to me: You love doing things yourself. You love creating. And you love repeating.

You have associated car rides with kid’s music, so as soon as we put the car in gear you pipe up from the back seat: “Dance? Dance? Mum-Mum, dance?” When a song is finished — particularly If You’re Happy and You Know It — we hear “Again?” from the back seat. To prevent your father and I from going completely bat shit crazy after six rounds of Itsy Bitsy Spider sung by nauseatingly happy fake Little People, we’ve instituted the Three Again policy: 3 listens to one song, then we move on to the next one.

And we know that you know exactly what this means, because as soon as we’ve warned you this will be the last time and the song is ending, you give out this fake boo-hoo cry.

You are so clever and smart, Goosey. I’ve said it before, but you are so much like your father this way. There is so much going on in that head of yours. You quietly soak things in, turning them around inside before presenting them to us. You are serious and shy, but smart and sweet when we are with extended family or strangers. You may not like to be too close to anyone but us, but you’ll dish out hugs and kisses — much to everyone’s delight.

At home, you are a characteristic crazy toddler. You love music and are starting to sing along to favourite tunes. We have a CD of songs with your name in them, and I gasped in astonishment a few weeks ago when, after one bar of music filled the air, you sang “Hello, hello” along with the first song. Leading up to the holidays, I started singing Jingle Bells to you while you brushed your teeth, and could hardly keep singing through the laughter as you shout out random words: …WAY!….HEY!…HA-HA-HA!…OHH!

Followed, of course, by “Again?” always with a lilt at the end. And most recently, the sweetest please (“Peeese”) because oh, how you’ve learned the power of good manners. You say please and thank you and you’re welcome and people are just tickled with how polite you are at not even two years old.

You love, love, love colouring. We go downstairs to play, and the first thing you do is dive in your crayons or markers or chalk. For Christmas your Grammie found you an eraser brush, and now you can draw-erase, draw-erase, repeat. Auntie Michele bought a giant Dora floor colouring book, and yesterday you spent nearly 15 straight minutes colour-colour-colouring cowboy Dora and a horse, sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs.

If we’re home together and I need to do something on the computer, you’re very content to sit on my lap and fill my lined reporter notebooks with circles and dots. It’s absolutely adorable the way you tilt your head to the side and “write” all of our names, eventually turning the pen over to me: “Goggie,” you’ll say, jabbing the page. “S-P-E-N-C-E-R,” I spell out while writing the letters. We do all our names, and so over top of my notes on investments and production deadlines there is a kaleidoscope of colours and names and scribbles. It makes me smile having to flip through to find a blank page.

You love: Small intricate items such as teeny plastic animals, paper clips, buttons and pen lids; noodles; Advent calendars; buns; cookies; kisses through your crib bars at bedtime; dancing while holding on to the bathroom counter, toothbrush in your mouth; everything and anything Elmo; milk; making boot marks in the snow.

Sign language is dropping away as your vocabulary expands. You call for us through the house, and your Daddy loves on weekday mornings hearing you ask for him from your booster seat: “Daaaaady. Daaady?!” You have reached mimic mode, and now say “Oh, shoot” as well as “empanadas” and dozens and dozens of words along with some sentences (“There it is” and “Bye-bye, Mum-Mum”). No matter where your father is in the house, if I ask you where he is, you reply “Work.” You call mittens “Mee-mees.”

One day Julia told me she was working on getting you to be more assertive with the other kids at daycare, that they were coming up and just stealing toys out of your hands. The next week, your best friend Mack, 3, told me you “gotted in big trubble” because you were laying across the couch and kicking everyone. Obviously you are testing all sorts of behaviour.

For the most part, you are an excellent listener. You do, however, adore being chased, and this can cause problems while trying to get you dressed or out the door. A few times we’ve been out and you have bolted out of my grasp towards the road, giggling. I have never experienced more breathless, utter terror in my life. Your Daddy and I do not believe in spanking, but when I yanked you down by the hood just steps from traffic, you got an instantaneous firm swat on the diapered butt combined with a gut crushing hug.

Love and Mummy Protective Services are powerful things.

Bedtime is around 7:30 p.m., and you usually sleep solidly until 7 a.m. or later if we don’t have to get up for work. Often you’ll wake up and just play quietly with whatever toys we line the edges of your crib with. We go in to say goodnight to you every night, Lucy. Your Daddy and I creep into your room, clicking off your Dora nightlight, straightening the blankets on top of you if you’re not completely spread-eagled over them on your belly.

This is our special night ritual. I always wonder if you remember the brush of fingers against your soft cheek, or the hair swept off your forehead as we greedily take one last touch of you to bed. I cannot sleep unless I know you are safe.

You are a Mummy’s girl. You love playing with Daddy the most, but will still come find me to show me a toy or sticker. If I’m in the house, only I can give you your bottle or brush your teeth. In the morning when Daddy gets you changed, I hear you asking for me, “Mum-Mum” floating through the quiet house. While I bask in your adoration and love, it is painful to see you outright reject Daddy when he so desperately wants to snuggle with you at the end of the day. He says it’s okay, and we certainly don’t want to force you to go to him, I know it upsets him. He treasures Wednesday nights.

Know that he is the best Daddy in the world, and adores you more than anything.

I love to sneak up the stairs when I pick you up from daycare and watch you for a few seconds. I see you zipping around the living room with a grocery cart filled with plastic animals, or trying to stuff a Cabbage Patch doll in the oven of the plastic kitchen. These scenes always make me snort, because jeezus, my child, what is going on in that pretty head of yours?

The absolute best part of my day is when you finally spot me peering at you over the gate at the top of the stairs: Your face breaks out in the purest of joy, relaxing into a giant smile and you run full-tilt before crashing in my arms in a giant hug.

There is nothing in the world better than that.

Love Mum-Mum

Possibly related posts:

1. Breakfast (and dancing) with Santa. With cookie licking!
2. Less chubby, more changes: Six months
3. Wave, bonk, crawl, dog: 11 months
4. My days as the Snuffle Monster: 18 months
5. Moments, at halfway: 6 months