For the last week or so, Lola has been transfixed by the cat-rattle that hangs from her chair. At first she would just sit there staring at it and occasionally smiling at it; then we noticed a kind of focussed twitch in her shoulders every now and then and realised she was trying to reach out to it.
It was soon obvious that this had become a top-priority mission, and every time she was put in her chair she would focus fiercely on this task until she made herself cry with tiredness and frustration. It was like watching someone trying to get to the next level of a demanding video game. 
Over each session you’d see some improvement, and then the coordination would falter as she tired; but each time she came back you could see a great deal of assimilation and background processing had gone on, and she’d show a significant improvement.
Today she has it mastered, and has been knocking away at the cat and her other rattle like a pro. In the evening, we put her in her gym and she applied her new skill to the various hanging toys there. She’s there as I type, gooing away to herself as she bashes away at her octopus and her whale. (Thankfully, she doesn’t have a bishop.)
She’s doing all this, I note, with her left hand (or arm, she has some work to do on accuracy); it’ll be interesting to see whether that preference holds. It’s incredible to watch — I get this big joyous swell of emotion: pride, I guess. And I have a big grin on my face. Sickening 😉
Wow — she’s coming out with some incredible noises, too; stuff I’ve never heard before. She must have impressed herself.
What a star. There has definitely never been a cleverer daughter in the history of the human race. 🙂