In the past month, Lucy has had this amazing baby-to-toddler explosion. I don’t really know what else to call it. I vaguely remember this happening with Catie, it’s like a whole bunch of things suddenly change all at once, and it’s usually right around their first birthday.

She isn’t walking yet, but I guess she’s decided she’s tired of crawling too. So now she does what we call her “downward-facing dog crawl,” with her tush in the air. Like so.

(I would like to state for the record that my voice in this video is not an actual representation of my accent. I was being silly to make the kids laugh. I don’t actually use words like “git” instead of “get.” Honest.)

She also figured out this weekend how to crawl up and down the stairs. Which meant that she wanted to do it about 20 times in a row. (On the plus side, it’s good exercise for me, I guess?)

She loves the swimming pool, and has no hesitation to leap out of my arms face-first into the water. It scares the crap out of me, and I catch her before she goes under every time, but she’s gotten a nose-full of pool water more than once.

Although she prefers to mooch her Mimi’s lemonade while hanging with her Pop-Pop.

The child is fearless to the point of having a death wish. I never really had to childproof anything for Catie (I would point at something and say, “don’t touch that,” and she actually listened to me and never touched whatever the thing was), but I basically have to tie down everything in sight when it comes to Lucy.

She seems more precocious than a lot of babies I’ve encountered. I think a lot of that is because she wants to imitate everything her big sister does.

Of course, this also has its downsides: she’s officially reached Tantrum Age. If you tell her “no” or take away something dangerous that she’s managed to get her hands on, she will throw herself face-down on the floor and scream like she’s being tortured. Most of the time I walk away (it’s my general rule for dealing with tantrums: don’t feed them more attention), but I can already tell that this girl’s toddler years are probably going to kill me.

She’s damn lucky she’s cute, that’s for sure.