What's Up, Dude?

The phone rang. My husband had just taken the kitchen trash out back to dump it into the garbage cans before hauling them to the curb for pickup the following afternoon. I was removing a steaming dish of cheese stuffed shells from the oven. Somehow I just knew that my son was going to choose this time as his first attempt to answer the phone.

A mother’s intuition is rarely wrong, so of course he picked up the phone on the first ring and pressed the pulsing green button. As I closed the stove and made a mad dash across the kitchen floor I heard the bleep of the talk button and heard him use his grown-up voice to say, “Hello?” The hello was quickly followed by a “yeah” and I made it into the dining room just in time to see him rest his elbows on the phone table and ask, in his mostly casually friendly voice, “What’s up?”

I took the phone from him to extend my own greeting. Of course the person on the other end was a telemarketing type in search of my husband (I had hoped it was a relative who could share in the mirth of the moment). She did not seem flustered or show any indication that she realized she had been talking to a two-year-old. If anything she was confused as to who I was and why I had commandeered the telephone.

The funniest thing about the whole situation is that my little boy tends to jibber-jabber on the phone instead of using real words and if he chooses to make use of his extensive vocabulary it is to tell the listener about his trucks or the latest video he has watched. He has never been the straight-to-the-point type on the telephone. What I wouldn’t give to have heard the other end of the conversation. At least he didn’t call the woman “Dude.”