Newsletter: month twenty-six
Dear Ladybug,
Today you turn twenty-six months old, and you couldn’t be happier about it:
Yeah, believe it or not, that is your happy face. Or rather, it’s the face you invariably make when we ask you to look “happy.” You somehow picked up this particular visage trying to master the art of smiling, and it got such a reaction from the Queen B and I on first seeing it that you quickly added it to your repertoire of facial expressions. Unfortunately, now it’s damn near impossible to get you to smile for the camera without making it, which means that in most pictures you now look less Chinese than Klingon. jIH parmaq SoH vav! DaH nob jIH yuch joq SoH Hegh!!
And you kiss your mommy with that mouth?
I jest. While you haven’t actually learned Klingon yet, you are becoming ever more conversant in English. You chitter and chatter to yourself and anyone in earshot continuously. More often than not, I have no clue what you’re saying: not only to you speak a mile a minute, but when you get really excited, you tend to shorten all not-entirely-essential words to a single vowel-phoneme, so that you sound something like “Oo ah ee aye aye oo ah more candy please Daddy?”
As your vocabulary grows ever larger, however, I find you tend to gravitate towards a few choice collection of phrases. Currently, your favorite is “Mine,” or other forms of the first-person possessive. Apparently your time in daycare has taught you all about proprietary claims, and so now you make them everywhere: ”My books.” “My chicken stars.” “My shoes.” In fact, when you are feeling particularly ornery (or Messianic, I can’t tell which), you start demanding ownership over ever more abstract entities: “My park.” “My sun.” “My essence of transcendental thought.” Well, you haven’t said that last one yet, but we’re getting there.
Most of the time this is a frustrating irritation, since you usually only choose to assert possession of some object exactly one second after I announce said object needs to be put away. “Mine!” you cry, and grab it so tight you actually fuse to it at an atomic level. The one exception, however, is when it’s time for bed: we brush our teeth, read a story or two, turn out the light, put you into the crib, and cover you with blankets, at which point you announce “My daddy!” and grab a hold of my arm like a pig-tailed leech, refusing to let go until I tickle you silly enough to relinquish your grip.
Another frequent character in your cast of comebacks is “Shesh,” which is the word “yes” puntuated at both ends with a healthy dose of lateral lisping. Having a “yes-no” conversation with you is a bit like listening to Sid the Sloth from Ice Age, except that I don’t secretly hate you for being John Leguizamo in real life. At first your mom and I thought this trait was cute and we’d imitate your adorable “yes” with a comically sloppy and exaggerated “jsheesssh!” of our own, except that you would then imitate our imitation, yielding a slobbery “jshsheessshhhshsh” that would leave the area within a three-foot radius about you covered in Ladybug spit and parental regret.
The flip-side of “shesh” of course, is “No way!“. “No way!” is your emphatic form of “No,” to be used when mommy and daddy are just to thick in the head to get it the first time. “Ladybug, do you want to put on your shoes?” “No.” “Kid, we need to put on your shoes to go outside.” “No way!”
In fact, “No way!” is almost always accompanied by “Go ‘way!,” so much so that I viewed these phrases less as a rhyming couplet and more as a single exclamation, albeit one with a significant gluttoral pause in the middle. The pairing of these two phrases is a direct result of the following string of consequences, which plays out almost daily like a verbal Rube Goldberg device:
- We request something of you, such as eating your vegetables at dinnertime or putting on your pajamas at bedtime or panicked instructions to step away from the ledge, etc. This leads to…
- You cry “No way!” and attempt a break-neck escape from the clutches of both your parents and any semblence of reason. This leads to…
- We chase after you to save you, or punish you, or (in many cases) both, and in that order. This leads to…
- You look back, see us following and yell “Go ‘way!” before sprinting even faster in the direction in which you are not looking. This leads to…
- You run smack into some blunt object and end up concussed.
In hindsight, it might be that last bulleted item that explains why you have yet to learn anything from this repeated little misadventure.
Mouthing off and panicked running are not the only forms of activity you get anymore, either: this month you’ve also mastered jumping. I was wondering if you’d ever get the hang of it. For months I’ve been watching you try. You would lift one leg off the floor, only to be sabotaged by the other leg still anchored to the earth. You would bend both knees, and hunker down, but could not figure out how to spring them back up again. You could lift your arms high into sky, only to be disappointed time and time again that of you did not follow suit. However, in a testiment to either your ferocious tenacity or your pig-headed stubborness (and given your repeated cries of “My jumping! Mine!,” I suspect the latter), you were one day able to sequence all the moves together and jump jump jump!
In fact, it is safe to say that jumping has superceded walking as your favorite form of locomotion, and you spend most days bounding around the house like a kangaroo, which given your continued adoration of The Wiggles, is perhaps not inappropriate. Indeed, any time that you are not jumping from room to room you are singing and dancing to some Wiggles song. You can, for example, perform from memory the entire “Monkey Dance, “Hot Potato,” and ”D.O.R.O.T.H.Y.” songs, and you’re also mastering the “Romp-pomp-a-stomp.” So while the far future may jold a job as a Wiggly Dancer for you, the immediate future has you dancing at the corner for quarters.
Actually, any time that you are not jumping and not singing and dancing to a Wiggles song, you are actively asking to sing and dance to a Wiggles song. Now I am a pretty good dad about appeasing your Wiggle-addiction – I watch the TV show with you and I watch the DVDs with you and I listen to the CDs with you — but some days (particularly thosed days during which I have already sat through the TV show and your DVDs and your CDs) I just don’t care, an apathy that works you up into a frenzy of panicked Wiggle-withdrawal. To that end, this month I bought you a Shaker, a little MP3 player with an external speaker and a single on/off button, onto which I downloaded every Wiggles song you own. One would have thought you died and gone to heaven: you now carry your Shaker on a tether wrapped around your neck, happily singing and dancing all day long.
If there is any downside to your Shaker, it’s that you don’t pronounce its name very well. You still mix up your t’s and k’s an awful lot, which means that you tend to call your MP3 player a rather a dirty name. And, predictably, if I attempt to correct you, the response is always the same:
“No way! It’s my Shitter! My Shitter! Now go ‘way!”
I still can’t believe you kiss your daddy with that mouth… but I’m sure glad you do, little girl.
I love you, Ladybug.
–Ba ba
Photo album
See more pictures from your twenty-sixth month of existence over at Flickr.
