The Emergence of Modal Verbs

Quotes of the week ...

• Might be a school day tomorrow.
• I go Home Depot look at pushmowers.
• Where's Dad Mom? (Me: He went to his class ... do you remember what kind of class he takes?)
• Might be a pickle class!

• I smart boy.
• I go a school day tomorrow.
• Don't cry at school. First play, then eat lunch, then naptime, then Mama comes back. Mama always comes back.

• Mom, how does this pear work?
• I might need cheese.
• I need Meow. I love that Meow.

• Don't need lotion on the legs. Is OK.
• No no sucky the nose.
• I do it self.
• Where's Dad? Dad's durkin.
• Oh peedonny ee-eye-oh. A pig here. There. Oink oink. Oh peedonny ee-eye-oh.

OK, now these are from one of my students who emails me multiple times a day. I have left all spelling and grammar the same.

• sorry kim,this is nothing to related to the study.i like your hair very muchquestions:1 where and when did you perm your hair?2do you need to make it look nice every day when you go out?3 how much is it? i m looking for a nice hair style which does not require me to combmy hairtoo much i will only dry my hair to other colour after the doctor release me! theytold me not to do anything for a long time becausse of my s.i had to usebaby shampoo for a long time after my surgeries which made my hair veryoily. i really hate it, now i m using certain kind of shampoo to help meget rid of it.thank you!
• "Especially after my brain bleeding, my husband just think every new day is a gift-present." (I think she had an aneurysm or something).
• "Why does my friend's cell phone message say, 'To page this person, press 1; to send an American page, press 2.'?" (I think she's hearing the words "numerical page")
• Wednesday morning, at the beginning of Developmental Writing class, this is how she greeted me: "Good morning Kim, you wanna see some dog pictures?" (she then presented me with a medium-sized photo album full of dog pictures -- snapshots and cut out from magazines).

And that's all for this week. But click here for more photos.

And p.s. Look at my nephew:

Read/see more here.

Feb. 2007 (29 months)

Well I have somehow forgotten to do monthly letters since he turned two, so I thought I'd do a random one tonight for his I'll-be-29-months-in-a-week celebration.

Dear Goosey,

This is what you look like now. It's a lot different from what you looked like one year ago:

And it's a whole lot different from how you looked two years ago:

I gotta say that I really just THOUGHT that I liked you then compared to how much I like you now. You just keep growing on me! (Pun intended.)

I don't know what to do with you these days now that you can carry on a conversation on any given topic in the free world. The other day you marched into the kitchen with two videos in your hand (we had made a trip to the library earlier that day), and you said, "Mom. I watch GROVER first and kitty cats second."

TRANSITION WORDS! You've got 'em.

And the other, other day, when it was freezing cold and you had enough energy for sixteen horses, we went looking for an indoor playground (read: McDonald's Playplace -- a mother's winter dream). But after two tries (most of the playplaces south of the Mason Dixon have at least a portion of their equipment on the OUTSIDE of the building), we ended up at Chick-fil-A. Their playplace was a lot smaller (and cleaner) and there was only one other desperate mother and child there. Ryan, age 3, and his mom, age at-least-a-couple-years-older-than-me (and pregnant with another one) were happily discussing the CAR and STEERING WHEEL which were apparently located in the top, Momma-Cannot-Fit-There portion of the playplace.

First of all I had to correct you for continually calling him "That boy." As in, "That boy! Come on up here! Play boy! Climb boy!" That's how we discovered that his name was "Ryan."

Secondly, I nearly died when, from the top of the playplace, I hear you and Ryan discussing the accoutrements of the car. He is saying, "Look! The cah's steehing wheel! It has a hohn!" And then your reply, "It's a CARRrrrrr. CARRrrrr." This from a kid who still says "Look at that lellow school bus."

This pronunciation correction incident is only interesting because apparently I had the same tendency as a child (a born ESL teacher). There was an incident in which my friend David (one year older and now a DOCTOR) said, "Look! A titty tat!" and I replied, "You mean 'kitty cat'."

Touché.

According to your Grandaddy, I am just getting payback. Fully deserved payback.

According to your Nana, you are just like Aunty Amy: I DO IT MYSELF!

But then there is the issue of your directional smarts, which you CLEARLY did NOT get from either me or Aunty Amy.

The other day we passed by the "salon" where you got your first (and only) professional hair cut. We hadn't passed by there in probably three months, but you, casually, from your backseat throne, piped up, "A haircut there. No, no do it the haircut."

And one final note about your verbal abilities (and my payback). When I picked you up from school last Monday, Ms. Lorene said, "He has talked nonstop all day. He has been saying things that I didn't think he would be able to say ... or even know about."

And I wanted to shout from the mountaintop, "HALLELUJAH THAT 22 MONTHS OF NURSING WASN'T FOR NAUGHT!!!!!!!!!!!"

But I refrained. Didn't want to embarrass you.

And don't even get me started on your acquisition of modal verbs.

Buddy, I may eat these words in 10 years when you're a pre-teen alien from you know where, but ...

IF THIS IS PAYBACK, I'LL TAKE IT.

Love,

Mama

Pitiful Cheese

HE SAID THE WORD PITIFUL
Originally uploaded by Kimmy Crack Corn.

Tonight, after half an hour of quiet, completely self-initiated truck play, I heard crying. So I went to check it out. And there he stood, holding out a red finger saying, "I hurt my Fee-ee--eeee-nger." So I said, "Should I kiss it?"

The reply: "Yeah, I'm pitiful."

Photos, No Commentary

This is late, I know. I stayed up until midnight making The Dad's TWO pumpkin pies (today's his birthday) and cleaning the bathrooms because Nanny & Gampy arrived today and so a blog post had to be postponed. And now I've had entirely too much Peter's Asian Fusion to write coherently, so I'll just refer you to the new pictures, 64 of which are related to this here purple tube. Fun, fun.

More later ...

My First Post in My Third Decade

Well, I turned 30 this past Sunday and am still mostly in one piece. I guess I thought I might spontaneously decombust or watch, appalled, as various bodyparts just fell off, or -- worse -- that wrinkles (and more gray hairs) would wrestle me to the ground. And win.

Instead I woke up, went to the third day of my yoga workshop, ate lunch, then spent over eight hours either in an airport or plane, and came home @ 10 p.m. to this:

The 10:30 p.m. cake-eating contest. He won.

It's been a busy week, but we have managed to take lots of pictures with our fancy new Camera From Nanny. Click here to see more.

That's mostly it. Leave a comment ... let us know you're here!

A week (or two) in Pictures

Well. I'm turning 30 in 3 days and I'm leaving for Phoenix tomorrow for a Yoga workshop and yet I can't stand not to do my Thursday night thing. Plus, Nanny did the unthinkable and sent me her CANON REBEL and although I so do not know how to use it, I managed to get this one picture, which has more of his body than any of the others I attempted. Clearly, I need to read the manual.

In other, much more important and exciting and happy news, Mamabird has just hatched another one! I was driving today and thinking about whether I should say that she laid another egg or that her egg had hatched or what exactly would be the appropriate bird-related euphemism for pushing out a baby. But anyway, Mama and the new Birdlet are doing fine, and you can see pictures here. CONGRATS BIRDS!

So besides getting the camera of my dreams, starting a new semester, and getting my hair dyed to resemble a freshly-painted fire engine, it's been a relatively peaceful week, and here's the evidence:

It's faded (hint: Palmolive takes out hair dye) and it looks a lot better when I add my new mahogany eyebrows and some blusher and lipstick.

We went out for pizza. He ate TWO slices that size and drank about 12 ounces of "cow muck."

It rained a lot and thankfully Macy had prepared us.

This one is from New Year's Eve ... a night in which I was determined to have fun despite the fact that Husband had to work until 1 a.m. John and I went out to hear his favorite musicians play, and of course he did a couple numbers with them.

I left the room to go get his pajamas the other night and when I returned, I found him in nothing but a diaper and that cowboy hat reading Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed (by Eileen Christelow). When he got to the second monkey head-bump page he said, "I know this one" and discarded it for Dump It! (by Darice Bailer).

There are several more shots of our week if you just click on any of the photos above.

Happy Weekend, and not that it matters, but Sunday might be a special day in case you'd like to call or send a card or check or flowers. If you ask JEB, "How old is Mama?" he'll say, "29 for evah." They teach them the strangest things at school.

I love my daddy because ...

He reads to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah ... whatever ...

I love my daddy because ...

HE MAKES TRAIN TABLES WHILE I'M AT THE GROCERY STORE WITH MAMA!!!!!!!!!

Add to that the recent father/son lesson on HOW TO CATCH A (gold)FISH (with a Disney rod & reel):

I cannot even hope to ever compete with that kind of handyman/sportsman ability. And so instead, I'm just teaching him how to spell, remember author's names, and read music. He's doing well, by the way. He can tell you the author of any book that we own ... I'm not even kidding. We just started, kind of as a joke, saying the title and author of each book before we read it, and then one day we discovered that he could, on command, tell us the names of all the author/illustrators of what's gotta be at least 50 books. Like, for example, if you say, The Very Hungry Caterpillar he'll immediately say "by Eric Carle." Yeah, I know. It's totally MENSA material.

Now the spelling I can't actually take credit for, because clearly it's from watching our ONE video of Blue's Clues. For those of you who don't know, the host of that show is named STEVE, and he wears his name on the back of his shirt and he spells it before he starts searching for the clues.

Coincidentally, B's boss is also named "Steve," so the other day as we drove by his house, I heard this from the backseat:

"Steve's house. Steve. S-T-E-V-E. Steve."

And then on another day I said something about a balloon that goes "POP" and he said:

"POP! Pop starts with 'P'!"

Coincidentally, I had overheard Steve telling Blue that same thing on the video earlier that morning. Not that The Goose ever watches videos. It's me who likes Blues Clues. I watch it when he's napping.

And so then tonight as we were reading Guess How Much I Love You (by Sam McBratney, illustrations by Anita Jeram), we got to the part where Little Nutbrown Hare is hop hop hopping around and he said:

"Hop! Hop starts with 'P'!"

Naturally I launched into an explanation of initial, medial, and final sounds and a little primer on rhyming. To which he replied:

"No do a big jump on the top."

This is a reference to the fact that he is not allowed to "do a big jump" except at the BOTTOM of the stairs. PEOPLE: He is totally getting that "hop" and "jump" are synonyms.

I cannot get enough of it. I mean, granted, there are times in the car when I am just like, "Turn on the Laurie Berkner so he will stop talking." But most of the time it is completely fascinating.

And the singing. Oh the sweet music to my ears. My mother swears that I sang in the crib as an infant, and after that I sorta kept on a path of musical inclination (which, by the way, has NO earning potential) so I will not be at all disappointed if he decides to, oh say, be in the band instead of playing such an awful contact sport as football.

Anyway, he got this Little Book of Songs for Christmas (no author) and last night we sat down and for 30 minutes ... 30 minutes y'all -- do you understand how long that is in the mind of a toddler? ... flipped through the pages and sang the songs. After the first sightreading he said, "Do again," and so I did, of course. And by the way, during this time, The Dad was upstairs taking a nap. Not that it matters in the least. But this second time as I read it, he'd say the titles of the songs before I even had time to start singing. He was remembering it all after only one read through. He even remembered the ones that I had passed over, saying, "I don't know that one." He'd say, "Not know this one" and turn the page. Then he'd find the picture of the man sitting under a tree and say, "Sing it Mama. John Jacob." As in John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. It's not like a man sitting under a tree gives any clue about JJJS, but still he remembered.

Sponge.

It's a good thing that I do not like to brag or go on and on about my kid because I think I could really get carried away and annoy some people.