Who doesn't love a good tummy flower?

Remember how I said that one month/six months/eleven months was my favorite age? I was wrong.

Turns out, my all-time favorite is a week shy of twenty months. (It's true.)

Sure, we're smack dab in the middle of the Terrible Twos on-ramp...which is really just a dramatic way of saying that someone is incredibly bossy and specific, with simply awful fall-out if not instantly heeded. (But I've worked in the theatre since the age of nine. This is nothing. Ever seen a diva with a improperly set wig head? A stage manager with a lost clipboard? A sound designer with a half-drank Snapple...by someone else?) I fear not my daughter.

Besides, I've always been exceptional at placating/distracting/tickling.

Last night, as a special treat (for me), I decided to forgo the nightly bath and let her play with her Little People instead. It was a humid night, her playroom is wonderfully cool, and her father is in tech rehearsal every night this week. (Besides, it wasn't like she was covered in blue cookie cake frosting- again- or anything.)

She set up a village for herself (out of a cast of hundreds) starring a fairy castle, airplane, carousel, train track, and small fleet of emergency vehicles. Nora sat herself in the center and quickly went about placing pets on the Ferris wheel. Fairies in rail cars. A king in the pilot's seat. When each seat and room was filled to capacity...she Godzilla'd them down. And then offered up an empathetic apology full of contrition and tears. Then she rebuilt the town. And promptly caused a car crash into a nearby farm stand. She finished it up by berating a character wearing bunny ears that We Don't Hit.

My point is- I could watch her play with her things all day long. And sure, I'm not feeling the sharpest mentally that I ever have (although I knocked the socks offa The Curious Village the other night, I will have you know). But I think I still have a pretty decent sense of humor. And this kid is funny.

She is a pitch-perfect mimicker. The phrases that she remembers (and she remembers all of them) and reuses are frighteningly spot on. And frightening.

NJ also has reached that critical age where she no longer requires my services at the park. (In her mind.) I still think that a ten foot high shaky bridge is no place for an assertion of independence- especially when its flanked by a) a twisty slide and b) a ten foot ladder drop-off. But I guess I'm just old fashioned. And way too girthy to squeeze up the ladder to retrieve my kid any longer. (For the next three months, at least.)

Last night she helped me make supper; salmon in a yogurt and mint sauce. The mint was from our garden, and every time we pass it, she needs to take a bite. ("Oh, my mint!") Every. Time. So last night I took a gamble that she'd dig the recipe. And she did. "My mint! Dip, dip, dip." The running commentary can get a little old, but hey- have you ever dined with a foodie?

Sometimes she seems impossibly grown-up, with big kid preferences ("I take my vites, now") and an uncanny awareness of exactly which devices and gadgets are capable of playing Dora videos.

But at night, after she's jammied and basted with apricot oil (or frosting), after the eight trillion books and sips of water, but right before the interrupted songs with requests for different ones...

...she's just my baby, resting her head against mine, with Doc Bullfrog pressed between us. And until she starts kicking her little soccer star legs against my sides with impatience, I can almost pretend that she's a lumpy little newborn again.

But then she kisses me- with added sound effects- and I snap back into the reality of how much more fabulous this is, anyway.

And that feeling lasts until I discover yogurt on the cat.