BUUH-BULLs and FLOW-AHs

I had to do chores as a child. I grew up with a neurotic mother (who probably could’ve benefited from a few of the pills I currently take to keep my control freak tendencies in check) and some of my first memories are of cleaning the kitchen chairs with a dust rag and standing on a chair at the sink to do dishes. So of course Joey is going to have chores. I figured I’d wait until he could at least reach the sink before I start putting him to work around the house. But lately whenever I empty the dishwasher, he’s right there by my side helping me.

I let him do the silverware. After I remove all the sharp knives, I open the silverware drawer and tell him to help mama put them away. He then methodically pulls each piece of silverware from the dishwasher bin and places it into the drawer (well, places isn’t the best word, he sort of flings the forks and spoons up over the side of the drawer because he’s not tall enough to really reach into the drawer) Back and forth he goes between the dishwasher and the drawer and he doesn’t stop until all the silverware is put away, though sometimes he gets distracted and stops to suck on a spoon.

After watching this a few times, I decided to see what else he could do. I started having fantastic visions of leisurely mornings spent lying on the couch with my coffee while Joey dusts and vacuums and cleans the whole downstairs. How young is too young to scrub the toilet?

So I gave him the broom to see what he would do with it. And as he started waving it around like a weapon, smashing it into the walls and knocking things off the counter, I realized he is still too young for manual labor.

Yesterday we made our second call to poison control after Joey ate the tip off a fireplace match. The first time we called poison control was when Joey was little and Eli put medicine in his eye. The room was dark and he couldn’t see the baby in the crib so he just went in blind with the dropper and gave Joey’s eye a nice dose of Infant Tylenol to help with teething. And just like the first time, I panicked and worried that the person on the other end would decide that we are far too reckless to have a child in this house and they’d be sending someone over to collect him and take him away from us forever. And again like the first time, the person on the poison control line sounded like they wanted to laugh as they asked ridiculous questions I never thought I’d have to answer about my child, such as, “Did he eat the whole match or just the tip?”

Joey is fine. Though when Eli came home from work he reminded me that the matches are strike anywhere matches and so we should probably make sure Joey doesn’t eat anything with a rough surface. I stared at him for a few seconds and then he started laughing. Because he is so CLEVER AND FUNNY HA HA.

Joey jumped the crib yesterday. It was during a nap while my dad was here. My dad said he heard a loud thud upstairs and when he went up to see what happened, Joey was just wandering around in his room. When I got home from work my dad and I talked about it for a while, trying to figure out how the hell he got out of the crib, (my dad thinks he did an intricate slide and hang maneuver from the corner, which would be a very ambitious move for even a puma, let alone a toddler with only two legs) but we were just grasping at answers. So I decided to do a reenactment by placing Joey in his crib and watching to see what he would do. He just stood there sucking his thumb and staring at us while we stared at him and the whole experiment was a massive failure. I guess he needs his privacy to perform his complex escape routine.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that we live in New England. I grew up here, and a big part of living in this area is that you talk a little funny. I don’t notice it much, but Eli is not from New England so he doesn’t have the local accent and he didn’t grow up with people all around him talking this way, and so he hates it. One of the first discussions we had about my accent was years ago when I was saying something to Eli about his sister. But apparently my mouth is unable to say the word sister without it sounding like some kind of foreign word and he couldn’t understand what I was saying. I just kept repeating myself. “Call your SISTAH” Huh? So I said it slowly, “Call y o u r  s i s – T A H!” What? Are you talking about my sis-TER?  Yeah.

So Joey is learning to talk, and probably R’s are difficult for toddlers to pronounce, or maybe it’s the first signs of the local speech disorder he will carry with him all of his life, but his new favorite word is flower. And like a true New Englander, he says FLOW-AH! And every time he says it Eli cringes while I beam with pride. I'm so proud of my little chowdah head!

Joey also says bubble, because we blow bubbles outside every day. But he says it like a person with a head injury, which I didn’t notice until we were standing in front of the bubbles display last night at Toys R’ Us. Joey saw the huge wall of bubble machines and bubble apparati and immediately lost his shit. He hung himself over the side of the carriage, stretching with his arms trying to reach the packages while chanting BUH-BUL, BUUUUH-BUL in a low, crazy voice that sounded like he was possessed. He says all of his other words in a high pitched baby voice, and it sounds sweet and…normal. Until he talks about bubbles, and then his voice gets low and out of his throat comes this resonant zombie drone that makes me think that perhaps he took a blow to the head during his crib jumping expedition. BUUUUUUH-BUUUUUL. He chanted all the way through the store, causing people to stop and look at us, probably feeling sorry for our little retarded child. BAHHHHHHHHH-BULLLLL, and finally Eli asked me if I’ve been putting beer in his sippy cup.

Last night we bought Joey his first Tonka truck. It’s a huge dump truck that’s almost as big as he is and I can’t wait for him to play with it outside today. It has been raining all week, so we’ve been stuck in the house and getting on each others’ nerves. But today the sun is shining so we can go outside, blow BUUUH-BULLLLs and run the truck through the FLOW-AHs.

Comments

[sherry]

I can't stop giggling over the zombie buhhhhhhhhh-bulls.

[jess]

oh my gosh, thank you so much for the laughs i just had. from one new englandah to anotha. :)