Beatrice at 23 months

Beatrice is closing in on her second birthday and the last few months she has grown up so much.

Beatrice has undergone a vocabulary explosion recently. From a few dozen words she has suddenly learned hundreds. Now she talks all the time - to us, to the dogs, to herself, and to imaginary listeners on the phone. She's starting to use more phrases and occasionally even full sentences, and it's much easier to understand what she wants. She knows the names of all her favorite foods, toys, and activities. Unfortunately, this also means she can demand things she wants, like when she stands in front of the cupboard and says, "Bar, please, Mommy" fifteen times in a row because she wants to eat nothing but granola bars all day. It also means she can tell me to "Go away" when I'm thwarting her will.

A few of her more benign recent phrases include:

1. "No socks today!" - on a day when she was wearing sandals

2. "Cromie dear" - for Cromwell. Shackleton is simply "doggie" or sometimes "Shack dog."

3. "Elephant cow" - her word for a woolly mammoth we saw at the George C. Page Museum

4. "Baby cow*" - her (very inaccurate) word for the stuffed saber tooth cat toy that David and Julie gave her

5. "Daddy's house" - the garage

6. "Wash baby!" - something she commands me to do every time she dirties her baby doll

She is constantly surprising me with all the words she knows - yesterday she said both "peanut butter" and "shark," two phrases I never knew she knew. Or she'll mutter some amusing aside, as when she looked wistfully out the car window today and sighed, "Doggies! . . . Outside, though."

Also, as I mentioned earlier on Facebook, Beatrice calls all children "babies." She calls all women "mommies" regardless of whether or not they have children with them. Men with children are "daddies." Men without children are "guys." The other day she called to a man at IKEA, "Hi, guy!"

Awhile ago I made the mistake of letting her watch some short animal videos on YouTube and now she is obsessed. Every time anyone brings out a laptop she demands to be shown "cat videos" or "dog videos."

A few of her favorite videos are the "world's smartest dog" doing tricks, a commercial featuring 100 cats let loose into an IKEA showroom in the UK, and the trailer for the excellent documentary "Babies." She also likes short excerpts from "Planet Earth" or music videos featuring dogs.

When she's not watching dogs on the internet, she is playing with her own. Of course, she has always loved the dogs, but now she really sees them as playmates (whether they want to be or not). Her favorite activity is to serve Cromwell elaborate multi-course meals of play food. She carries one item at a time out of her playhouse and sets them in front of him on the lawn, and she insists he sits still and pays attention while she serves him. She also likes to "dress doggie" by draping clothing over Shackleton. The dogs are happy with - or at least indifferent to - these games. She also insists they be present in the same room with her at all times, and any time they walk away she calls after them immediately.

"Dressing" Shackleton

Overall Beatrice is as cheerful, fearless, and funny as ever (her new tricks are head-spins, somersaults, and going down playground slides face-first). Unfortunately, we continue to have problems with her aggressive physicality. As I've said before, she plays very rough with her friends, often grabbing them by the shirt to get their attention or hugging them so hard she knocks them down. She also becomes physically aggressive out of anger, and she is quick to push or slap kids in order to take their toys or defend her own. I know that all toddlers do this to some degree, but Beatrice seems to be the one who does it the most. While I admit some part of me is proud of her when she tackles a 10-year-old boy for standing between her and an animatronic woolly mammoth statue, most of the time it's just embarrassing and stressful as I tell her for the hundredth time "no pushing" or "say you're sorry." I really hope she tempers this behavior before she starts preschool in the fall.

What makes all of this pushing and hitting the more curious is the fact that Beatrice is one of the most loving and nurturing children I've seen. She adores animals and babies, and loves nothing more than gently caring for dolls and stuffed animals, cradling them, feeding them, and wiping their faces. She also hugs and kisses everyone and everything all the time. She's almost always happy and even when she's upset, she snaps out of it moments later like it never happened.

She refers to the garage as "Daddy's house."

Also, this week she successfully used the toilet for the first time! I'm not concertedly trying to train her right now since she's still under two - and more importantly, I don't want to add any additional stress to her life right before the new baby comes - but she is very, very interested in all things "potty." And after a few weeks of announcing "potty" and then sitting down on her small toilet after the fact, she finally figured out to tell me before she went "potty" so that she was able to sit down on the small toilet and use it properly. And as exciting as the "potty chair" was before, it became all the more exciting when Dev and I praised her and gave her a Hershey's kiss for her accomplishment. Now she's really hooked.

Playing with Jack in his backyard

Beatrice has had a huge number of changes thrown at her in the last few months, from moving into a new house to moving into a toddler bed, and she has handled them all very admirably. While she can be fussy and demanding, like all toddlers, I am still so proud of her resilience and cheerfulness in the face of all sorts of new events. This coming year will hold a lot more changes for her, from a new brother to preschool to toilet training, and I'm excited to see how she does with all of them.

*"Cow" is her catchall term for otherwise unidentifiable four-legged mammals. She uses the term to mean sheep, yaks, zebras, horses, elk, deer, moose, and apparently, prehistoric mammals.