My daughter Nora turned three a month ago, making the title of this column obsolete. She's not a new girl anymore. Neither, as she will tell you, is she small, a baby, a little girl, or anything else diminutive. She is a big three-year-old girl, and she will waggle her three outstretched fingers in your face to emphasize the point.

This stage has its advantages, and they are many. She plays by herself in her room and amuses herself safely while I can make dinner or check my email or whatever needs doing. We took her to Paris and to Morocco a couple of months ago (more on that later); we could take her to museums, albeit briefly and she did much better on the plane than ever before: a princess sticker book or two and a little talking-to about how big girls act on planes helped a lot. There was still a little crying, but hey, big girls cry on planes sometimes too. (Goodness knows I can attest to that.) She has decided that little potties are for babies (thank goodness; I don't like the little potty much either) and now wants only to sit on the big toilet, and woe betide you if you suggest she use a stepstool to get there. She can articulate her feelings with great clarity—though that can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. It's great when she is saying she feels scared of a motorcycle, and I can comfort her; when she insists strenuously on wearing her pink party shoes every day, or points out that it is still light out and thus she does not feel it should be bedtime? Not so great.

We are having to work hard to stay ahead of her, in other words, and it's tougher to put one over on her than it was in the days of the year-round 6pm bedtime. An aside: Boy, I miss those days. She fell asleep hard and fast then, and now it's an hour-long round of books and poems and songs and another song and "pat my back, Mama" and "I want to tell you a secret, Mama" and "Mama, there are boogers on my fingerrrrrr!" (That last one just kills me, because, kid, I so did not put the boogers on your finger.)

Even though she can outsmart us on occasion, I don't feel so new at this either, anymore. I have already passed into the nostalgic stage where I ask strangers how old their tiny babies are, and then I coo and tear up if they are under a month. My strong, confident, girl, who recognizes her name in print and can write half of it (the O and the A) herself, is certainly not a tiny baby anymore, and I do sometimes miss that infant phase. She's little enough, though, for plenty of cuddles and lots of lap time. Even though she sits up alertly for readings of her favorite books there's usually moment when she slumps, tired and content, against my chest while I read, just as she did three years ago—only then her whole self fit where just her head is now.

We may have been doing this parenting thing for a while now, but what is raising a kid but an endless series of new surprises, challenges, worldviews? On our trip, we got a fresh look at Paris, where my husband and I had both been before, several times. But never with our daughter looking out the hotel window at the Eiffel Tower and declaring, "It's the real Paris!"; she had seen pictures of it before in Madeline and other books. We'd never sought out paintings in the Musee d'Orsay with quite such intensity as we looked for the Degas images of ballerinas, and we'd never thought so hard about what flavor of ice cream to get at Berthillon (chocolate ended up being the obvious choice for Nora).

Our Paris trip (really two short stays, bookending the Morocco trip) was a new departure for me, in that I tend to plan and overplan trips in order to try this restaurant and that, make sure I'm seeing everything, seek out the best—part of my work is travel writing, so it's a deeply ingrained habit. On this trip, though, we were jet-lagged and on short time, and we didn't want to push it too much, so I resigned myself to the idea that Paris will still be there in fifteen years, when we can go back without a little kid, and then we can go to whatever restaurant is hot then. For now, wandering the streets, soaking up atmosphere, and spending our attenuated dollars in whatever restaurant looked tasty and available right when we were hungry was plenty fun. As was sitting in a darkened hotel room, trying not to wake Nora, and drinking cheap wine and eating a takeout pizza by the sparkles of the Eiffel Tower's light show. It was, indeed, the real Paris.

We didn't have such clear notions of what we'd find in Morocco, to which we traveled because my husband's brother and family have relocated there for work. They had a baby while posted there, so we got to see our new nephew as well as Nora's other cousin, who is her age. Watching the kids play together was reward enough for the long trip; watching them play hide-and-seek in the faintly tiled ruins of a 12th-century mosque, with storks nesting on top of the crumbling minaret, was magic. We drank mint tea and ate almond pastries at the Kasbah, overlooking the Atlantic; we bought orange juice squeezed to order from carts in a eucalyptus-shaded park; we shopped in the souk while the kids slept, and Nora woke up just in time to help decide what necklace I should buy. It was all new to all of us, and seeing that most of the world is just that new and surprising to our daughter, every day, is what keeps parenting from ever getting old.