Miss Independent

It's like a switch flipped. One day she was a clingy baby, venturing out only for short periods before coming back to check in with me.

This week, she became a resident of Independence, Missouri. Her favorite movie became "Independence Day." Her favorite Kelly Clarkson song is now...you can guess.

She went from slow and cautious to blindingly fast. A few hours ago I caught her straying into the bathroom, the one that has no safety lock on the toilet, so I walked after her to catch her. Hearing me approach behind her, she hit the gas pedal and kicked it into high gear, moving her limbs as fast as I've ever seen her. She tried to outrun me, and she came closer than I would have put money on.

She suddenly crawls all over the house. She explores without caring if I'm in the room. This morning she pulled herself up on the seat of her highchair and stood there, trying to figure out how the harness strap works, for no less than thirty minutes.

The time is fast approaching where she won't need constant care and attention, the way she always has. Yesterday we went to the park and instead of sticking close to me and studying the sand, she powered over to a group of kids and accepted their invitation to play with their trucks. She didn't even look to see where I was. After they left, she wandered over to two three-year-old girls playing near a big stone tortoise in the center of the sandbox. They totally mean-girled her, sitting down in front of the tortoise and explaining sternly, "You can't play with us. You're just a baby. This turtle isn't for babies." I gently tamped down the instinct to strangle them both with the shoelaces of their pink sneakers and instead led Sadie away, but she clearly couldn't have cared less -- she shot them both a big grin as we left.

Who is this kid? She can't walk yet, and is still probably a couple months away from doing so, but for the first time, her physical limitations don't seen to bother her. She's losing her shyness in the name of exploration and fun. After a bad period last week in which she threw a lot of tantrums, she seems to have shaken off the drama and realized that life is more fun if you just find a new toy to play with.

And if that toy happens to have lived under the couch for the past three weeks and is now covered with dust bunnies and cricket parts, then all the better. If it actually is a dead cricket, then triple word score.

This change is much-welcomed, because winter means launching into the preschool shuffle. This deserves a post of its own, because not only is it already time to worry about getting Sadie into a desirable preschool toddler program (I can hear my mom's eyes rolling in her head as she read this), but I'm actually late to the party in not having worried about it up until now.

But we'll get into that another time. For now, PT continues, morning nanny continues (can't wait until that ends -- I don't love getting kicked out of my own house every day, plus taking conference calls from my car sucks), and we search every day for new places to play and new things to explore. Tonight it's over to my parents' house, where Sadie will torture my mother's dog, drink out of his water bowl, and probably get some sort of poop on herself.