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I love you, dad.

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Drunk men work here.  This’ll waste your free time for the next decade.

Dear Ladybug,

Yesterday you turned twenty-two months old. Seeing as how you are my little princess, I gave you a kiss to celebrate this fact, whereupon you promptly turned into a frog:

No, I jest. You haven’t turned into an amphibian… you’ve become something far more complicated.

You’ve become a little girl.

For example, you look like a little girl, or rather, you don’t look like a baby anymore. This is most apparent nowadays when I look at you as you play. Adorned in a regular tee-shirt and blue jeans, with a pair sneakers on your feet and a simple pony tail in your hair, you resemble less a baby girl than a GAP commercial. You are tall and skinny, with bronze skin and wavy hair and a smile full of pointy shark teeth. You are beautiful and funny and more than a little testy, like a teeny tiny supermodel — traits that I can only hope you’re developing naturally rather than gleaning from the seventy-six different “Do you want to be a supermodel” type shows your mother loves to watch.

More to the point, however, you act like a little girl, or even worse, a tweenager. You tune us out with your own CDs, demand equal TV time to watch your DVDs, giggle with excitment at your favorite boy band (currently, The Wiggles), turn your nose up at any healthy food we offer you, and generally complain that we as parents are so mortally embarrassing to you that you’re just going to crawl into a cupboard someplace and die.

For example, take your vocabulary. It’s growing by leaps and bounds. This month you’ve started to string words together into simple sentences, like “drink apple juice?” to ask for a drink, or “please jacket outside” to ask for your jacket to go outside, or “Elmo dance?” to ask to watch your Elmo singalong DVD for the five-hundredth time today.* Why, just the other day as we were putting stuff into the trunk of my car, you pointed to your emergency diaper stash and said “Elmo diapers.” “No,” I corrected, “those are Pooh diapers. We used up your Elmo diapers.” You looked at me hard for a second, and then suddenly nodded, adding “Elmo diapers. Nana and Papa’s house. All gone.” Dear God, I got a completely correct synopsis of the fact that we used up your Elmo stash when we visited your grandparents in Nevada last month. I can’t tell what I marvel at the most: the extent of your memory, your ability to express it, or the fact that I can now expect all comments I make to you to be considered of dubious factual authenticity until receive explicit confirmation by you.

* In point of fact, these sound more like Dit apple juice and peas dadit side and Elmo dansh, but who’s keeping track?

Of course, even though your conservational skill is generically developing at an exponential rate, paradoxically enough you’ve taken to expressing many of your thoughts with a single word: “No.” It’s not yet usually a temper-tantrum-inducing act of revolt — we’ve got two more months before I can expect that full-time — but more of a causual act of defiance to see if we as parents are paying attention. For example, a typical exchange might go like this:

Me: Eat your dinner.

You: No.

Me: Do you want a time-out.

You: No.

Me: Then eat your dinner.

You: [ Make a big show of scooping food onto the spoon, cram it into your mouth, and then grab you drink and guzzle it down in the hopes that it might help wash the horror of the food down your throat. Then you gasp for breath, having barely survived this last spoonful of death. ]

Me: Sheesh, kid. Do you want me to take your food away?

You: No.

And then repeat this ad nauseum.

It should be no surprise, then, that you favorite book right now is Where’s Spot?, a book involving a search for a naughty hiding dog. Each page asks “Is Spot hiding in location X?” and features a fold-out flap to reveal the animal hiding behind the flap, a collection that includes a lion, an alligator, a boa constrictor, a bear, a hippopotamus, and several penguins. (Who the hell owns this house?) The Ladybug, when asked if Spot is hiding here, loves to flip the flap over and say “No,” page after page after page. Even when we get to the last page, the one with Spot on it, she’ll insist that “No,” he’s not there. “No, no, no, no.” “Are you being contradictory, little girl?” “No.”

As another example of your unexpectedly early tweenage behavior, on Christmas Day you received as a gift a small Elmo CD player that plays four different plastic “CDs,” each containing about six or so children’s melodies, and that thing hasn’t left your side since then. You will rifle through the CDs and plug one in just long enough to, say, listen to There’s a little wheel turnin’ in my heart before ejecting the CD and swapping it out for another, just to listen to one track on it. You can go at this for hours, eventually listening to all of the songs in what I can only describe as the world’s most inefficient “shuffle” setting. Your mother attributes this to a frustratingly finicky disposition on your part, but I’d like to think of you as the next step in human evolution: homo MP3piens, a hominid naturally selected to thrive with an MP3 player.

I love to listen to you sing. One of your current favorites, owing to your recent infatuation with The Wiggles, is No more joeys jumping on the bed, and Australianized variation on the children’s song involving concussed monkeys and an irritated doctor. You and I tend to sing the song as a duet: I sing “n little joey’s jumping on a bed / One fell off and bumped his head / We called up the doctor and the doctor said,” at which point you chime in using your sternest doctor’s voice and wagging your finger admonishingly “No more jo-jo ha ha haa!”

An amusing intersection of your fondness for music and saying “No” is the song If you’re happy and you know it. We have this song on CD, and that version goes through clapping your hands, stomping your feet, snapping your fingers, and shouting hooray. You enjoy clapping your hands and shouting hooray, and absolutely love stomping your feet, but after a month of practice you still can’t figure out the finger-snapping thing, much to your increasing irritation. Your resentment reached it’s boling point a little bit ago, when while listening to song’s third verse, you did the following:

CD: If you’re happy and you know it snap your fingers!

You: No. [ Crosses arms in a grump. ]

CD: If you’re happy and you know it snap your fingers!

You: No! [ Keeps arms crossed. ]

CD: If you’re happy then you really oughtta show it! If you’re happy and you know it snap your fingers!

You: No! [ Blows raspberry. ]

You tell that CD player, little girl.

You also taken a fascination to the alphabet this month. When you see the big bright letters on the covers of your books, you immediately strat humming the “ABC” song, pointing at each and randomly announcing a letter that is could possibly be. In fact, this whole alphabet thing is new to you, since right now, according to you, the alphabet consists of the following letters:

Ay, Bee, See, Ee, Huh, Huh, Gee, Huh, Huh, Huh, Huh, Huuuuuh, Pee, Huh, Uh, Ess, Uh, Huh, Vee, Uhhuh, Ecks, Huh, Zee

Still, it’s a good start.

I was beginning to worry that you were growing up too fast, the “2-going-on-20something” path. But then the other day we were all sitting in the living room, watching TV and playing with your blocks. Suddenly you froze, stood up, and then let out a massive fart. For a moment there was silence, as you mom and I gaped in shock. Then, just as suddenly, you burst into laughter, announcing “Ah-na toot!” Then you thought better of it, pointed at me, and announced, “Da-da toot!” and laughed again.

That’s when I realized that if you are still willing to pass gas in public, and then badly blame it on someone else, maybe you’re just as childish as you need to be.

I love you, you little stinker.

– Ba ba

Photo album

See more pictures from your twenty-first month of existence over at Flickr.

Fun with movies

The Editing Room has fantastic abridged scripts of Hollywood movies.  If you’ve ever read the abridged Phantom Menace script, this is where it came from.

On the other hand, How It Should Have Ended offers alternate, more aesthetically pleasing (or at least significantly funnier) endings to Hollywood movies.

Don’t forget to be kind and rewind.