After the last time Grammie and Papa babysat, they left us a two-note written report:
1. Papa: “Let’s have a little noseblowing lesson.” (Gets out his hankie.) “Look.” (E. pays no attention.) “Look!” (E still pays no heed.) “Watch this trick!” (E looks up right away; Papa blows nose loudly.)
E: “That’s a pretty good trick!”
2. E’s climatology lessons:
“When the moon comes up, the snow will rise.”
“When the snow rises, the sun will go down.”
Of course, we have remembered some more quotes (and found ones we missed on little bits of paper – wherever we jot them down when he says them) since the marathon, so here we go.
After Daddy reorganized the basement to a heroic extent: “Mummy, can I go downstairs?… ’cause it’s very clean down here.”
After we told him no, we weren’t going into that store because it was full of boring stuff (AND we didn’t have time): “No, I wanna see the boring stuff!”
Describing his status when food-messy: “I’m chocolatey, a little bit.” Also, “I’m a juicy boy.”
Speaking to his imaginary family, including himself, in his big red sports car: “Mommy, Daddy, E**: Are you in your seats?”
After doing some zerberts on my stomach: “Close your bellybutton and it will be warm.”
While trailing his fingers across our piano keyboard and seeing them ripple over the keys: “Watch my fingers be a bug.”
Discussing the anatomy of the dinky car: “That’s the headshield and that’s the windshield. How funny is that?”
Sometimes, he agrees that he’s silly. Sometimes, he says, “I’m not silly, I’m cool.”
Speaking to Auntie Em, from his backseat to her seat in the front: “How ya doing back there, Emi?”
Having a linguistic discussion at the dinner table, Auntie Em (who speaks some Italian) asked him, “Do you know how to say ‘mushroom’ in Italian?” Of course our little comedian replied “Yeah,” waited a beat, then said, “Mushroom in Italian.”
He went through a phase where he would ask me, upon seeing my teeth, “Are those eggs in your mouth?” WEIRD. I explained several times that those were my teeth. So now he shows that he remembered his lesson: “Those aren’t eggs in your mouth, they’re teeth!”
When I told him I had to open the door because Daddy and K needed to carry our big (new to us) TV downstairs: “Daddy and K are gonna carry a big TV? Because K is big and Daddy is big?” Right. After all, what other kind of TV would they carry?
One night last week when the sisters were conversing together and E was playing quietly nearby, Auntie Beth innocently said something about a cookie. He has radar hearing for this word: “Did you say cookie?? What did you say cookie for?”
While watching “The Cat in the Hat” on DVD: “There’s the fig and a digger.” (He means “thingamajigger”, the Cat’s magical all-purpose transportation vehicle.) [1) I have to say that of all the kids' TV shows I've seen, I like "The Cat in the Hat" best. It's funny and smart and the kids act like real kids and Martin Short is wonderful as the Cat. 2) I adore Dr. Seuss, but the actual story of The Cat in the Hat gave me anxiety as a kid, every time.]
There’s a small, pinkish stone that somehow made its way into our house this summer. It once gave E a bout of severe agitation: Daddy got up from sitting on the floor with him, and E started crying: “Daddy, your toe! Your toe is off!!” It took Daddy a few minutes to realize E had seen the toe-coloured stone and assumed the worst. Daddy carefully explained and showed E that all his toes were healthy. Now he sees the stone and reminds himself: “That’s a rock and not Daddy’s toe.”
E has discovered that try as he might, he can’t really boss around the adults in his life. He takes out his innate bossiness on the cats: “Nico! Go away!” or “Ramona, get off of there!” Usually, they’re right where they should be, and we remind him to be nice. But we can’t really blame him – we scold those cats often enough.
You can tell E is having a growth spurt when he doesn’t just ask for one specific snack. Some mornings he wakes up and asks for breakfast like this: “Can I have some cheese and puffs and raisins and penguin crackers and puffs and o’s and cashews and yogurt and raisins and cheese? Please?”
As I’ve mentioned, he wants to “show you” stuff all the time. Recently, he decided he liked the phrase “Check it out!”, and used it on everything and everyone.
There’s a little story that was apparently well-imagined in his mind, because he told it to at least two of us, a few different times: “There’s a lollipop in the crab that lives in the stone. The sheep lives in the stone too.”
This summer, he got his first dinosaur book with the actual names of the creatures. For a while, for every scribble he drew he would say, “It’s an apatosaurus.”
This summer, he spent quite a bit of time in a polka-dotted maternity top that looked way cuter on him than on me. He was also potty-training, so there was the odd mix-up with the skirt: “Me wear my dots! They’re in the laundry ’cause I peed on them.”
Today, he’s on fire, talking up a storm. He knows all his letters, but I’m pretty sure he thinks every combination of letters spells his name (Or occasionally Mommy or Daddy.) This time, he made a T I I out of some sticks, and said it spelled his name. (As many of you know, we didn’t name him Tii. Actually, only one letter is right.)
Later, he picked up his favourite grocery bag (the one with a photo of giant blueberries on it) and said “I’m going to the grocery store. I’m gonna get groceries.” When I asked what he would be getting, he named “Apples and carrots and beets,” which are all things we’ve recently bought at the farmer’s market. So cool! But then, that was not what he ended up with. When he said he was done, he told me he’d gotten “a phone grocery and a ball grocery and a rooster grocery.” He meant it.
We were also talking a bit about Christmas. Mostly what he remembers about Christmas is that he saw a deer at Christmastime last year. Right now, I’m not sure what he thinks. He asked, “Can we go to Christmas now, please, Mummy?” Sounds like he’s under the impression it’s a place. He continued, “I just wanna go to Christmas now, okay, with my poky little puppy, okay? With my wobbly puppy that looks like a worm.” (His “poky little puppy” is a rolling wooden dog whom E has dubbed “Farmer”. He is indeed wobbly.)
Where on Earth did this boy get such loquaciousness, you may ask? Easy. His Auntie Em. 
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