Posts about cognitive, motor, and social development in toddlers
She was at the top of a boulder at the edge of the playground — not a big-for-a-toddler pebble, a real one, taller than she is and then some, with a flat top she’d hauled herself onto using footholds she’d worked out on her own. I could see her knees shaking from a few feet … Read more
Seventeen. That’s the number I kept landing on when I went down a full rabbit hole about how toddlers learn to walk one night after my youngest had what felt like her four hundredth tumble before lunch. Seventeen falls per hour. And that’s not the number for a kid who is struggling, or tired, or … Read more
It’s 5:30. There’s a two-year-old at my feet, a baby on my hip, an onion half-chopped, and the Paw Patrol theme song coming from the next room. My daughter is parked in front of it, three feet from the stove, and for the next thirty minutes I am going to get dinner made. I’ve written … Read more
There’s a creek at Oak Creek, at the Red Rock Crossing in Sedona, Arizona, shallow and slow, with a soft muddy bank where the water goes still. Last April I took my daughter there on a whim, the day too good to stay inside, and within about ninety seconds she had lowered herself straight down … Read more
A sound machine arrived with the diaper bag from a friend from the prenatal group. It was already set to what I can only describe as active tarmac. I left it on for a week before I started wondering what, exactly, I had plugged in six inches from her head. She’s two now, and we … Read more
The Sleep Sack That Finally Stopped the 3 AM Blanket Hunt In those early months, I was constantly adjusting blankets, worried about safety, and losing sleep over whether my baby was warm enough. A good sleep sack eliminates that entire category of nighttime problem—no loose fabric, no repositioning, just contained warmth that lasts through the … Read more
I went in to check on her and found her like this: face completely down, head buried so deep into the mattress I could not see a single feature, legs sticking entirely out from under the blanket, bare feet catching the faint light from the hallway. The cartoon animal blanket — the one with the … Read more
There is a carved bear in a mountain town we pass through, taller than I am, sitting forward on its haunches with its front paws curled like armrests. It’s carved from a single trunk, stained a deep amber-brown, flanked by a pair of carved birch trees so the whole thing reads as a forest scene, … Read more
We were at Pho King Good, the Vietnamese restaurant where my daughter has eaten since she was four months old, strapped to me in a carrier. She’s two now — right in the middle of the most intense phase of toddler motor development she will ever experience. That night, she reached across the table for … Read more
