And Some Little Girls Bite Cats

My two-year-old daughter is all upside down and inside out. If she wants to go upstairs, she says, “I want to go downstairs.” If she’s up and wants to go down, she declares, “I want to go upstairs.” When we play outside she will announce that she’s had enough by asking to go outside instead of inside.

A few weeks ago there was a little girl in the church nursery who was obviously younger than my little sweetums. I was amazed when she pointed to a nearby crib and asked to go “up.” I thought all children were as completely confused as my own. When my son was younger he used to get “up” and “down” mixed up all of the time. Apparently not all youngsters are as directionally challenged as mine are.

There are days when I correct my daughter out of the goodness of my heart because I want her to grow up and be able to communicate her desires with the other people in her world. But there are those days when I just shrug my shoulders and do the opposite of what she asks because I understand what it is that she is asking for, and because I just can’t imagine that explaining to her for the one hundred and eleventh time that she already is upstairs is actually going to make it stick.

Besides, it makes me giggle when she comes to me and cries, “Mommy, I bit Seamus!” Please understand, I don’t find it to be funny when the cat gives her a little nip (however well-deserved), but the sincerity of her voice during those tearful confessions elicits a smile from the lazy part of my brain that derives so much pleasure from her little misnomers and chooses to let them stand uncorrected.

Dinosaurs Have to Go Too

This summer started the visits to the library with Daddy. I love the library. I love books. I love to read. I was just a little afraid to take our destructive children to a place filled with wonderful books that don’t belong to us and can be destroyed so easily.

Now every time I hear the sound of paper tearing I fly through the house in a panic to stop the crime and hope in the small section of my brain that is still functional through the terror that it is not a library book, but rather some innocuous shred of paper like a sales receipt or the grocery list or a book that already belongs to us that is old and has been through three or four children previously.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the children were content to sit apart from each other and read. The baby, however, likes to look at the same book as her brother and when two children are paging through the same book in opposite directions disaster is bound to ensue. And of course there are the small tears already in the book from someone else’s child that are exceedingly tempting to tug at.

One of the first books borrowed from the library was a lovely book about dinosaurs. On one of the pages amidst pictures of bones was a picture of fossilized dinosaur droppings. It would seem that the technical name for dino poop is rather cumbersome to the mouth of a two-year-old; so in my husband’s all-surpassing wisdom and foresight he decided to refer to it as “fossil poop.”

This a toddler can say. And Daddy thought it was funny. Everything sounds cute and adorable when spoken with the voice of the sweetest boy in the whole world, even “fossil poop.” So the words were spoken, and Daddy laughed; every time the phrase was uttered, Daddy chortled.

The little boy noticed that Daddy was amused. He’s quick that way. When he gets reprimanded for turning summersaults on the couch or squeezing his sister’s cheeks too hard he will look into Daddy’s eyes very gravely and say, “fossil poop,” like it is some sort of Get Out Of Jail Free card. It is the period at the end of nearly every sentence. All of his bowel movements are now big fossil poops. It’s beginning to get tiresome, like a bad joke. Try explaining that to a toddler who has gotten so much use out of it.

At least he can also identify almost every type of dinosaur, whale and shark. There has definitely been some real learning to punctuate the bad education. I’m really hoping that the fossil poop education stops here and that my sweet little boy doesn’t decide to hold a class in the church nursery one of these weeks.