Rachel, Owen and Kathryn

At nursery Katy has recently produced some wonderfully cubist stick-person drawings of her family. In a themed series of 3 sketches she depicted: herself taking the cat for a walk (slight surrealist touch here as the artist herself admitted this would never happen); her Daddy exercising; and her Mummy sitting on the sofa. A fair representation of the energy expenditure of this household, I have to admit. She's also started counting forwards (and backwards) to/from 20, although 15 gets routinely expurgated from the sequence. For tonight's bedtime story she chose a counting book as well as a story book. She read through it quite quickly until we hit 8 (currently her favourite number) at which point we had to actually point at and count all the 8 sweets pictured. And all the 9 socks. And all the 10 presents. When she turned the page to see 11 umbrellas she sighed deeply and exclaimed: "Oh, not again!" I was actually crying with laughter and had to abandon all hope of...

At 2 years and 2 months Katy is moving out of toddlerdom and into 'early childhood'. Her language skills are becoming ever more advanced: she can name most letters of the alphabet and recognise them in different contexts ("that's an M for Mummy"). From about age 2 she was starting to use pronouns, but was mixing them up ("Mummy, sit next to you" meant "sit next to me"); now she has mastered even the deictic pronouns although she doesn't always get the case right: "Let I tuck you up" she tells her toys. As well as knowing numbers in sequence she has actually grasped the concept of 'twoness' and 'threeness' ("there's three cars", "look, two green bottles"). Talking of number twos ... we've started toilet training and she's making steady progress now - though initially I thought that what we saved on nappies we were spending on carpet cleaner!

When I was pregnant I had already resigned myself to not having weekend lie-ins ever again. Well, not till the offspring reached teenage years anyhow. But Katy is beginning to connect certain days of the week with particular happenings and - bless her - has now got the concept of weekend . And weekends are definitely A Good Thing. 'Friday' is her favourite day of the week - but in the same way that 'two' is her favourite number. Normally an early riser (6:20 as a rule) this morning she slept in until 9:45. This never happens!

On a tip from friends we visited Walton Hall Gardens (21st March), which offers a 'children's zoo' and a superior playground featuring a complicated tunnel installation which Katy explored very thoroughly, fighting off all the older children. The zoo was populated by some very dramatic peacocks, a motley collection of rabbits and guinea pigs, a couple of donkeys and ponies, invisible red squirrels, and a little herd of dwarf goats. Two of them wandered out of a barn and Katy announced "Two goats!". Impressive enough, thought I, but then another trotted out and she said "Three!" Blow me down, the child's not yet 20 months and she can count! Her parents were not as clever, however, as we managed to leave home without her coat. She had to wear my grey fleece with the sleeves rolled up, but it was so long on her she looked like a mini Gandalf wandering through the Shire.