Toddler Tracks: More Recent Quotes and Conversations

Okay, I’m seriously overdue for one of these posts. The word “recent” in the title is relative – a lot of these quotes are from the summer or before. And really, he says quotable things ALL the time, but these are the ones I’ve managed to note down. It’s a marathon… there are so many, I’ve had to categorize. [BTW, you may notice I spell it Mommy sometimes and Mummy sometimes. That’s cuz he uses both – and Mama too.]

Social Niceties:

• He’s doing well with “Please” and “Thank You”. The more he wants something, the more Pleases he inserts: “Mommy, can I please have a graham cracker, please?”
• He’s learned about “How are you?” A few months ago I was bowled over when I came home from work and asked him this, and he said, “Pretty good. I have a nice day.” His standard response has been “Pretty good” ever since.
• Sometimes he goes past niceties into full-on charm: he’ll often say things like, “I like your necklace, Mommy, it’s pretty,” or “I like your shirt.” One time (when he was avoiding bedtime) he said, “I like your hair, Mommy. Nice haircut.” And another time, “Mummy, you’re a smartie.”
• He can also do fist-bumps. He calls them “Pops” (props) or “Bones”, depending on the people he’s with and what they taught him to call it. (I still prefer the kisses.)

Food Talk:

• Letting us know his cracker had fallen down into his booster seat: “Cracker, where are you?”
• Embarrassing us on the patio at a local cafe where we knew the server, E pressed his face against the screen door and bellowed, “Where’s my coffee??” I swear he never drinks coffee.
• He’s also been known to ask “Where’s my wine?” when other people are having wine. One evening when Emi was babysitting, he got especially insistent: “I said I wanted wine!” Someone’s going to call the authorities on us one of these days.
• Once when he got up from a meal, I said, “Oh, you’re full of crumbs,” to which he replied, “I’m full of beans!” (He hadn’t been eating beans, he just knew he was full of ’em. ‘Cuz I told him so.)
• He had so many cupcakes around the time of his birthday that on the first day he didn’t, he asked at breakfast, “Where’s my cupcake?”
• He’s always been a fan of “circle crackers”. This summer, a friend brought us some mini ones. Every time he wanted some, he would request “circle-crackers-that-are-little, please”.

Potty Talk (skip this section if you don’t want to hear about stuff that goes in a potty):

• Apparently he got this from the kids at the babysitter’s, who were encouraging him with his potty training over the summer. One evening after getting up from the potty, he looked at the… business he’d completed, and said, “It’s a blueberry one!” (It was.)
• He’d gotten out of bed because he said he needed the potty. I’d told him as soon as he was finished, he’d be going back to bed. We waited. Then he lawyered me: “I didn’t poop in the potty. So I don’t go to bed.”
• Mommy: “Did you poop on the potty?” E: “I didn’t… but I will be.”
• E: “I need to poop on the potty!” Mommy: “Are you telling me the truth?” E: “Yeah. I am. Telling you the truth.” (He wasn’t.)

Flights of Fancy:

• We were looking at the picnic table at the park with a big burnt spot on it. He thought it was dirt, but I told him somebody had burned it. He took that in stride: “I burned it. There was a pirate.”
• Describing a dream he had while we were at Camp this summer: “I saw a chipmunk, a rhinoceros, a gorilla, a totem, and Woody.”
• His first made-up song – he sang it the same way several times: “Once there was a little bear, he lived in a house, his mother singed Shibaba!” (Shibaba is his favourite lullaby.)

Understanding of Techmology:

• Daddy just got an iPad. (I know. Sigh.) I got home from work yesterday and E said eagerly, “Mommy, I’ll show you Daddy’s big phone.” Pretty weird to think that a phone, to him, is a computer that’s light enough for him to pick up.
• “I need a screwdriver for my Lightning McQueen shirt… ’cause it’s got a crack in it.”
• When Daddy was drilling to fix our broken bed, E could hardly contain his excitement: “I’m gonna go get my drill!! Do some drilling!!” (He does have a toy drill with a rotating bit. The two of them “drilled” very happily together.)
• He’s fully yet obliviously branded. Looking at our big flat metal magnet with a black frame around it, he determined: “It’s a Kobo – press a button, make a noise.” You can see how this mistake would occur, once he’d played with Papa’s Kobo (e-reader).

 

Adult Phraseology:

• Sometimes you know he’s just absorbing turns of phrase straight out of the mouths of the people around him. For example, sentences like this one, completely out of context: “Wait a minute, Daddy! What’s going on here??”
• There are short ones like “Good grief” and “Oh my goodness”. Then there’s “Ooh!”, “Wow”, and “Whoa!”, as in, “Ooh! There’s a big digger!” I don’t know where he got these new ones, “Doggone it!” (he pronounces that one “donnit gonnit”) and “Geronimo!”
• We’re enjoying “How crazy is that!” and “How cool is that?”, which he says a lot. Interestingly, there was a totally different tone when he said at a restaurant the other night, “I have a red booster seat on a red chair. How funny!”
• For some reason, “sure” sounds really adult. Mommy: “Can I have a kiss?” E: (thoughtful pause) “Sure.”
• He’s watching our manners too: “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
• He even sometimes says, for no apparent reason, “Don’t talk in the ranks!” (This is a direct quote from The Jungle Book movie.)

Beginner Empathy:

• If I utter something he perceives to be an epithet or otherwise upset exclamation, he’ll say, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
• Occasionally, when I do something like pull up his pants for him, he says, “Thanks for helping me, Mommy.” So nice to be appreciated.
• He knows how we feel about him: “Daddy loves me… so much.”
• He’s learning which of his behaviours make us concerned. He’ll even agree, “I made you all worried.”

Mispronunciations, Malapropisms, etc.:

• “Look Mommy, there’s some roddengold.” (Goldenrod. He was very taken with it.) Similar to when he said “banklet” instead of “blanket”.
• Watching me apply lip balm: “Can I try the chopstick?” (And once he has some on, he’ll always say, “My lips look pretty!”)
• Sometimes he accidentally spoonerizes phrases. I recently enjoyed it when he asked for the story of the “bolly jarnyard”.
• He has selective trouble with the “y” sound. He can say “you” and “yes”, but he still says “lellow”. If we coach him with “eeeeeeyyyellow”, he will just reply, “eeeeeeeelellow”.
• Same with the word “use”. He ends up saying, “I wanna lose that!”
• For some reason, he mispronounces “huge” and it’s too cute to be corrected: “That was a fuge tractor!”
• He likes to make his toy animals gallop around, but he insists they’re not galloping but “galling up”.
• In the summer, while he was potty training and very often pantsless etc., he would say, “Me run around with naked.”
• Somehow, despite having almost all his pronouns sorted out, he still says “I wanna carry you,” instead of “I want you to carry me.” (And dammit, he has never carried me anywhere.)
• There was a brief phase where he would ask to get down from my lap by asking for “hand-me-downs”.
• Sometimes it makes him very sad if he can’t say a word properly. He has had some tough times trying to pronounce “breakfast”. One morning he was all sleepy and tried to say it, but it came out “Bleffs…wex”. Then he cried bitterly, “I can’t say that word!”
• We were once astounded to hear him say (apropos of nothing), “Daddy, I’m so proud of you. You came back!” There must be an alternate-universe soap opera going on in his head.

Vocabulary awesomeness (you know we teach him strange words for our own entertainment, just to hear him say them):

• At Camp, he learned a new word for the mini-bowls he got to use; one morning the first words he said were, “I want fishies in a ramekin.”
• “I’m gonna do some lolloping, okay?” This after we read a book called “The Troll”, in which the rabbit lollops across the bridge.
• The time he suddenly said, “I’m annoying!” we were taken aback (as we laughed). We have (almost) never told him that.
• He and Daddy have a game called “ensconced in pillows”. This is what it looks like.

And… random bonus quotables:

• “My dump truck. It is snuggling with me.”
• “Daddy, can you take off your onesie?”
• “My mouth need a kiss. My teeth need a kiss, because of the fishies. They have fishie crumbs in there.”
• Talking about his dinky cars: “Right now, I spin them on the table. That will be crazy!”
• While playing on his bed: “It’s amazing out here!”
• E: “My lips are right here.” Mommy: “What do your lips need? E: “Kissing.”
• E: “I wanna get up.” Mommy: “Too bad. It’s time for you to sleep.” E: “Too bad.”
• E: “I’m scratching my nipple.” Mommy: “Um, don’t you think that’s a mosquito bite? Your nipples are on your chest.” E: “No, my nipples are on my arms, that’s where they live.”

E: Thanks for the kisses, Mummy.
Mommy: You’re welcome. I love to give you kisses.
E: I love you… to give you kisses.
Mommy (getting understandably mushy): I love your kisses, I love your face, I love the things you say. I love you all over.
E: And… I love my neck.

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