Last night, I sat with my daughter on my lap after she walked(!?!) over carrying a picture book Grandma gave her for Christmas featuring a lineup of Sesame Street characters. As she turned each page, we played a game where I would point to items and characters on the page and she would tell me what they were in her singsong little voice. The number of things she could name correctly absolutely floored me. She likes the game so much, she’ll ask to play it repeatedly, and each time I taught her a new picture/word combination, she almost always got it right on the very next run-through.

Later, as we drew warm water for a bath, she leaned over the edge and played with the bubbles as the tub filled up. She picked up a duck and dropped it into the water, laughing as it splashed under the bubbles. I caught this out of the corner of my eye and asked her if she could find her turtle and put it in the water too. She looked up at me, then carefully walked over to her toy bucket under the sink, selected the wind-up turtle aunt Christi gave her, and dropped it into the tub with the duck. I asked her to get her boat and her frog, and she knew exactly which item I asked for each time.

I love that little girl more than I could have ever imagined.