Pronounced just like that. O-Owe. We hear it all day long, mostly as she’s throwing food from her highchair onto the floor. But more lately, as she’d developing a love of pens and pencils, and she knows when she’s not drawing on paper because she’ll follow up with “o-owe”. All pens and pencils have been collected up and stored out of her reach. But being the climber that she is, that ‘out of her reach’ is raised a bit more every few days. And if a pencil does happen to be left out – or in a handbag, under the couch or any other place accessible to my little firecracker, she will hunt it down and be up to mischief in the time it takes me to blink.

Picture me cooking toast, making school lunches, testing Liam on spelling words and telling Ethan numerous times to put his undies on his bottom and stop running around with them on his head, and you can picture the average morning in our house. Amelia tends to spend this time strapped into her highchair, to keep her within site and up to as little mischief as possible. But this morning she wasn’t. This morning I let her roam about the house. This morning she kept popping her head around the corner to see me in the kitchen and tell me some very interesting baby babble. To which I probably nodded and said ‘oh yes’ or something similar. After about her third little pop-in-to-say-hello, it dawned on me that I think her pop-in-to-say-hello’s were actually, you’d-better-come-see-what-I’m-doing-in-here’s.

She found a pencil.

I took it off her.

She realised I wasn’t as thrilled about her masterpiece as she was.

Awww