Twenty minutes of conversation, written as it was happening

This morning after waving Ian off to work from the window, Audrey turns to me. "Mama, see Ally? Go see dragons, dinosaur-roars?" This is her way of asking if we can go with our friend Ally to the museum, where there is a children's play area full of dragons, and an exhibit with enormous dinosaur skeletons. "Wow," she says whenever we go. "Look, Mama, dinosaur-rex!" Her favourite thing to do at the museum is "See animals!" and so we always head first to the big section about the natural world - evolution, ecology, biology. Audrey touches the bubbly shapes of the "atoms" on the DNA model with her fingertips. She touches the rough and smooth sides of huge, naturally formed crystals. She tries to name each animal, and there are thousands - lion, big snake, little snake, elephant, hippo, really big bird (that's an albatross, darling), dodo. At the top is a sandpit where children can excavate dinosaur bones, and a model of our planet with an atmosphere that grows turbulent in different ways depending on how you spin it. There is a rhino with its horn missing. There are colouring pencils. "Love dinosaur-roars," she sighs.

After talking about the museum she climbs up onto the box where we keep her soft toys, and pretends to be "Trapped, Mama, oh no! Oh dear, got trapped!" Her little hands on each side of her face - oh no! "Shall I save you, darling?" I ask, holding out my arms to her. "No, Mama, no. " She waves me away. "Sofa, sofa." And then, when I obediently sit on the sofa, she nods and says "Good idea."

She's looking for one of her soft toys, a moose actually, from Canada, but she thinks it's a deer. "Where deer gone? Deer! Where are you? Where are you?" I fetch it from the toy box, hold it up for her. "No, Mama, no this one teddy bear deer." She wants to see a real deer. I tell her that where I grew up there were muntjacs who drank from a pond in the next village over. I tell her maybe one day we'll see a real deer at Nana B and Granddad Pop's house, but by now she's forgotten all about the deer and is "driving" her little yellow toy race car up and down the window. "See car?" she asks. "Mrrmmm mmmrrrrrrrmmmmmm..."

She holds the car up to me to take, and I drive it up her arms, across her shoulders. She peals with laughter. "Mama, how 'bout Graham? See Graham?" - "Not today, darling. Later." - "Okay... how 'bout... PIG!" She snorts and snorts. "Mama, pig, pleeeeeease." I join in with our game of pretending-to-be-pigs. She grins so big. "LOVE pigs. Daddy Pig eat chocolate cake." She snorts louder, loudest. She picks up a soft blue cloth.

She's dusting photographs in frames on the window ledge. This is one of the ways Audrey helps me with the housework. "There," she says. "Nice and clean." She points at the people in the pictures, almost all of them have Audrey in them. "Little Audrey," she says. She counts them, "One Audreys, one Audreys, three Audreys."

I think about how little she is, still, and about how fast she's growing, how she's only a few months off two years old. I think about the photos I still have of her when she was born, and how I could hold her with one hand. I clap my hands. "Let's get ready for kindergym, okay?" She nods, solemnly. "Yes. Let's get coat. Wellie boots. Ready steady GO! See you later."