1.    She has a couple dozen books and a seemingly limitless number of songs and rhymes memorized.  Sometimes when we’re driving in the car, she just starts parroting off a book or a story or a song – in either French or English.  Cutest damned thing IN THE WORLD.
  2.    During grapefruit season, I go through about ten grapefruits a week either as a breakfast food or as juice.  For some reason, grapefruit does not interest Charlotte at all.  I tried to convince her to eat it by pointing out that when I was pregnant with her, I ate a grapefruit nearly every day.  Now whenever I ask her if she would like to taste my grapefruit or drink some of my “pink orange juice” Charlotte tells me “No, I cannot.  When I was a VERY! LITTLE! BABY!, I used to eat that and I had TOO MUCH.”

We went to the San Diego Zoo with Courtney and Harper and afterward Charlotte was very distressed when she found out that there were no pictures of…wait for it…the giraffes’ butts.  “But how can I see when they poop, Momma?“  Kids are weird.

  3.    She took a two and a half hour bath yesterday.  Even with more wrinkles than a bloodhound, the kid didn’t want to get out.  Amazing.
  4.    Now that she has a pretty firm handle on French (that is, she understands everything and is starting to respond in French more consistently), we have started introducing Charlotte to German in small doses.  The other day, Charlotte told me “That is a Kuh.  It is a vache.  It is a cow.  Yes.  It has so many names!”
  5.    She is suddenly obsessed with eating everything with a spoon, including her milk and her smoothies.
  6.    A few weeks ago, numbers suddenly began to click for her.  She figured out that two is more than one, for example, and that receiving two of anything is usually better than receiving one of something.  So at night when Donald leaves the bedroom, she tells him he needs to check on her in TWO minutes, NOT ONE, presumably because two means he’ll be there sooner.
  7.    She lives in a world all her own.  Yesterday she treated me to a story that involved a polar bear, a dragon, and a princess.  She is particularly interested in Rapunzel, so just about every story features someone named Rapunzel as well.

  8.    She is a big believer in giving spontaneous kisses.  It melts my heart every.single.time.
  9.    Last week, Charlotte came along when my sister and I were fingerprinted for foster-care.  That afternoon, I spread out glitter glue for her and we ‘fingerprinted’ her.  She has been bragging about being fingerprinted and showing off her fingerprint card to everyone lately.
  10.    Over the weekend, my father took Charlotte to a park.  Every morning since when I ask her what she dreamed about at night, she has told me that she dreamed about playing with Grandpa at the park.
  11.    Last night, I noticed something sparkling on Donald’s pants, just below his pockets, at about the place that little hands would put something.  It was two small sparkly egg stickers that Charlotte found in a box in her art cabinet.  It made me smile.

** Charlotte is two years and seven months old.