House of Snot

Heard in a whiney little voice last night in between Ny-Quill induced comas: "Mommy, my boogers make my words sound funny."

Yup... that about sums it up.

A beaver says what?

I'm in the bathroom this morning brushing my teeth. J's on my bed with a few of his stuffed animals. I'm half-listening to their teddy bear dialog and his imagined scenarios until suddenly I hear "Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!"

Now, just an hour earlier, when he dropped his entire bowl of cereal, milk and all, on my freshly swept and mopped kitchen floor, I may have, in the silentest of whispers, uttered the same word somewhere in the vicinity of his keen earshot.

"Dammit, Dammit, Dammit!" he says again.

I steel myself and sweetly say, "Hey honey, I know you heard Mama say that word this morning, but I shouldn't have said it. It's an ugly word, and we shouldn't use it, ok?"

He looked up at me very matter-of-factly, holds forth the stuffed critter who has broken the language rule, and asks, "But Mama, what else is the beaver going to say?"

Cute kidism

I often share the cute things that Jonas says with my friends at work, and inevitably someone will remind me that I should be writing them down so I don't forget them.

So, without further ado, my first cute kidism post:

J-man has a great vocabulary, both in English and Spanish, but as all kids will, he often forms words of his own. The most recent, and cutest, is "lousy". Yes, I'm fully aware that lousy is a perfectly valid word, but to J-man it doesn't mean the same thing as it does to the rest of the world. You see, somewhere along the line he's taken "noisy" and "loud" and combined the two into this new amalgam of a word which he uses to describe everything from the radio, the washing machine, to cars.

Still, it always makes me chuckle when he says "Wow Dada! Your car sure is lousy!"

Conversations with a 3-year-old

Driving home last night:

"J, when we get home we're going to make spaghetti for dinner."

"Mmmm! I love spaghetti!"

"Me too. Is your tummy empty?" (because that's how he says he's hungry)

"Nope. My belly is big... just like Daddy Dave's."

I'm giggling.
"Daddy Dave has a big belly?"

With total and absolute preschool sincerity "Yes Mama, it's so big he doesn't even have a lap!"

It was all I could do to keep my car in it's lane I was laughing so hard. God, I love my kid!

Watch your tongue

Last night, sitting in the parent's kitchen, J-man upon Granny's lap and extremely fussy. I'm trying to make conversation with him to get him to stop whining.

Recently he's begun to realize that our two cats are, indeed, individuals and that they have names of their own. Up until now they were just "kitties", a collective furball fun for chasing and otherwise tormenting. But the other day I was pleasantly surprised when he paused to squeeze one of the slumbering furballs and said "Look Mama, this one Bumper."

Yay!

And later in the day, he correctly pointed out the sour-puss Chloe.

So, back to last night. We're all sitting around the kitchen island, J is fussing and being uncooperative. Trying to get him to focus and engage in something other than fit-throwing, I ask him "J-man, can you tell Granny what the kitties names are?"

He thinks for a moment, and then with all his two-year-old sincerity he tells her "Kitty Stupid."

A little shocked and wondering where he picked that up I gently remind him that her name is Bumper, and she's a good kitty.

Not content to leave things as they are, I ask him what his other kitty's name is. And once again, he didn't fail to amaze me when he piped up "Kitty Fucking!"

Everyone was in stitches, except me, of course.

Thinking back, I realized that the other day, while cleaning up the cat urine incident on the couch, I did indeed utter something along the lines of "Stupid F@%$ing cats!" Of course, I believed at the time that J was well out of earshot.

And so, excuse me while I go chomp on this bar of soap.