Sometimes I feel like Hazel is growing faster than my brain can comprehend, and I underestimate her – a bad word, but the only thing I can think of. And then I think that parenting is probably just a lot of trial and error – can she do this yet? Or this? And then I get to a thing that she CAN do really well and I feel kind of like, “well shit, how long have I been depriving her of THAT?”

One of her favorite activities is talking on the phone. She spends hours every single week talking on the phone. Chattering, laughing constantly, peppering the conversation with words that she is learning. It’s one of my favorite ways that she pretends, but it has never, never occurred to me to ask her who she’s talking to. It never occurred to me that she might have an actual conversation partner in mind, I guess usually because she’s the one talking incessantly and not letting the person on the other end of the line get a word in edgewise. Yesterday she was, for a change, doing most of the listening – a high-pitched new squealey giggle that she’s been perfecting, and “yeah…cool”, every few seconds. Running laps around the kitchen island. Half an hour straight. I finally asked her who she was talking to. She gave me this look:

“Are you daft, mother?”

“Come on, tell me! Who are you talking to?”

She raised her phone-less hand, palm-up, rolls her eyes ever so slightly towards the heavens, and whispered in an annoyed voice (exactly the same way I do when she interrupts my phone conversations… oops), “Wot.”

Duh, Mom.

Of course she was talking to Walt. Not, you know, Grandma or Paisley or Morgan or Alice. Her one and only these days.

And then…

She peed on the potty. Nineteen months old, right?? This isn’t going to happen again until 2011, right? I had her stripped down for her bath and plunked her down on her little potty, where she’s been sitting multiple times per day – clothed – since we moved home. And I’ve been EC-ing her off and on in varying degrees since she was born, and I know that she DOES have some grasp of the sensation of peeing going with the word “PEE” because of that. Other than that, we’ve done nothing remotely resembling “potty training”.

So anyway, I put her on her potty because I knew she’d reliably sit still there for sixty straight seconds while I finished drawing her bath.

“This is where you poop and pee. Sit on your pot for a minute.”

And she did, staring vaguely off into space with her hands folded neatly in her lap. I never fathomed that she might actually pee, but she DID. She peed, beamed at me, and stood up to run to the edge of the tub and wait, tossing me looks over her shoulder as I rejoiced. I am 100% certain she knew exactly what she’d done. We dumped it in the toilet and washed it out and the whole time I was trying not to FREAK, but I said “Hazel you went PEEPEE on the POTTY!! YAY!” <— total mom voice. And she was looking at me with her “duh, mom” face but eventually my excitement caught on.

“Peepee ‘da POYEE. YAY!”

Yes little girl, yay. Yay, yay, yay, yay. You are awesome.

Edit: …and then she slept all night in her own bed until 7:00 a.m.

Listening: Damien Rice
(I am) Reading: The Poisonwood Bible; Last Child in the Woods
(Hazel is) Reading: Whoever You Are
Working on: plans & projects & packing