This baby's like a winter bird, punchy and sweet.

Today is Genevieve's 2.5ndth birthday. She is at the peak of twoness. She is the twoiest two you ever did see. Twotally. She is a little baby and I can pick her up one handed and carry her easily on my hip; she is a big girl who climbs stairs All By Herself and will soon have her Very Own Bed; she is a polite, well-spoken lass who says "excuse me" and "thank you" and "please"; she is a hair-trigger Uzi of shrieking, tearful, incomprehensible rage and anguish.

She has a hawk's eye for airplanes and she knows a gibbous moon from a crescent. Reads all the time. Plays with trains and tea sets. Dances around in circles, buzzing like a bumblebee while I play "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain". Licks jam off bread and sings little songs to herself, like Frances.

She watches videos with me in the evenings when I come home from work; I sit in the beanbag and she sits on my lap and we watch Babe, her very favoritest movie ever, over and over and over again. If you have to watch something over and over and over again, you could do worse than Babe. It's a really well-made movie, funny and serious and simple and nuanced, accessible to a two-year-old but not insulting to the intelligence of an adult who has a tendency to deconstruct everything. I know the thing by heart now. I notice every background detail, every tiny inconsistency, and have elaborate theories to explain it all. Yeah, it feeds the OCD to be forced to obsessively watch the same thing, and yet on the other hand I'd be just thrilled if she had a somewhat wider range of appetite. "Can we watch something else tonight?" I ask, pleadingly. She considers. "Mmm. Nope. I wanna watch Babe. It's my favowite." And there's no comeback to that.

Not when I win, regardless. Sitting in a beanbag with my daughter in my lap and a blanket thrown over us, my arms around her waist and her hands messing with the hair on the back of my hands: that's about as good as anything gets.

We started the Advent calendar today, a day late, which meant that Herself got two pieces of chocolate instead of one, which was okay because today's her half-birthday. Happy birthday, bombanat.