It took years before I realized it was more than one word. Ditto the phrase "pass gas," treated in my family as a single word and conjugated as such. "Pee yew! It smells like passgas in here!" "Ha ha! I passgassed on your leg!" Et cetera. I wonder what linguistic quirks Sophia will hang on to as she grows up. Already the cutest ones live only in the baby book -- "wawer" for water, "mushaboom" for mushroom (in reference to the song, and perpetuated by her parents). For a long time she rendered "sp-" as "f-", resulting in such gems as "Fiderman" and pronounced "sk-" as an exaggerated Hebraic "ch-", pointing out the moon up in the ccchhy and gathering up a bag full of books to go to ccchhool. Her world is now inhabited by the regulation Spidermen, skies, and schools, but she has a funny little accent, a baby accent, I guess, that sounds like a Brooklynite by way of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. "I need a HAYULP to get in my stroller and then we can go to the PWORK!"* (Although I'm trying to break her of the habit of calling me "MWAHMWAH.") There is also the toddler's charming syntax; every night I hear plitplitplitPLITPLITPLIT as she runs dripping down the hall to inform me with a look of slightly malevolent glee, "I taked a bath!"
Sometimes she overcorrects, though. We have an old record, dating from a period in country-western with which I was intimately familiar (when I was six or seven my father gave me his old AM-only radio, which predictably in Wichita got all country, all the time), called Sesame Country, and oh Lord is she obsessed. It features a game Glenn Campbell and a terrified-sounding Crystal Gayle, as well as a Loretta Lynn who sounds warm and familiar as always (and who, at least, had probably actually seen Sesame Street before doing studio time with a manic, befurred amorphous blue blob). There's a song called "The Last Cookie Round-up" that features the refrain, "This is the last cookie round-up /Eat 'em up, cookie-i-ay." I was singing it recently when Sophia put her sticky hand on my shoulder and said exasperatedly, "No, Mama! It's, 'Here is a cookie I ate'!" Which is how she sings along, earnestly, in her tiny innocent voice.
I won't disabuse her of that interpretation, lest I be deprived of the pleasure, years later, of telling the story whenever possible. This is what my mother does in a similar instance, only it was my younger sister and a record of "Gimme a Redneck Girl.". "Gimme a, gimme a, gimme a red-eyed girl," she would croon at the record player. Who would deny that it actually represents an improvement over the original?
* * * * *
We've been watching Lost on DVD, Sean and I, and we're about halfway through Season 2 (please do not tell me what happens! I beg of you! Although based on what I have seen thus far I suspect you would not be able to tell me much anyway!). This morning we tag-teamed breakfast as we always do, taking turns amusing Sophia in the kitchen with egg-stirring tasks and water-pouring and egg-eating and for-the-love-of-god-do-not-feed-one-more-bite-of-that- to-the-goddamn-dog-she-looks-like-a-braunschweiger-on-toothpicks-already. After defusing multiple mini-tantrums and mopping up spill after spill, while I contentedly plucked my eyebrows and gave my teeth more than a cursory wave of the brush, Sean sat down to his eggs with a frayed look in his eye. As I sauntered up to the table, he said of parenting a two-year-old, "It's like that button in Lost. Except you have to push it every 108 seconds, and the code is different every time."
Which is why he is the best husband ever.
* * * * *
Desperate for cool-weather clothes (boo frickin' hoo, all my old stuff is too big), I dragged Sophia to the mall today. At H&M, fresh from the car ride, I squatted down next to her and said some cheerful things about what we were going to do that day. A woman pushing a stroller paused and looked at me, aghast.
"You're a mommy?" she asked, disbelieving.
"Um. Yes?" I said, wondering which direction this was going to take.
"You talk so NICE to your child! It makes me feel terrible!" she said, and looked even more horrified as I began to guffaw.
"Only for another ten or fifteen minutes," I said. "Come back later." And I couldn't stop laughing. She disappeared off into the mall, which was unfortunate, because she missed the show in which stroller-less Sophia insisted on darting out into the mall, climbing the security sensor gates, swinging from the clothes rack, and disappearing from my sight at every opportunity. My voice grew thinner and tighter and testier, and the only thing that saved me was when she dumped my purse out on the floor and discovered a lollipop. Thus pacified, she contented herself with lying on her back in the aisle. I did get two sweaters (same thing in different colors), so I consider the trip a raging success.
*"Help" and "park," respectively.