Okay, okay. I know this does not count as officially talking. It was a pure accident, or something like that. But this morning when I walked into the room where Molly was sitting on the floor, she looked right at me and said, “Hi Dada.”
Then she proceeded to say, “Ba ba ba aba. Haaaaaaah. Da da da.”
Then she spit up a little bit.
Here is some footage of a typical dinner with Claire. I got a little bored waiting for Claire to finish eating, and after taking a few photos with my cell phone, I remembered the video recorder. It is fun to have real conversations with Claire nowadays.
Claire has started to ask some rather interesting questions about the world.
For example, you may recall that she likes to pretend to be working at a fast food drive-through, sticking her head out and saying, “You want a combo? You want cheese?” It still cracks us up. Lately, she has extended this game to sit-down dining, holding a notepad and crayon in hand, saying, “You want bar-b-que? You want Diet Coke?” Anyways, the other night at dinner Claire said, “Combo? What’s that? I’ve never seen a combo.” It must seem funny to her. Every time you ask for a combo, you get a hamburger, fries, and a drink instead. But what the heck is a combo? It must be some kind of food. Does it taste good?
Claire also noted recently that she has never seen a dinosaur. This is a pretty remarkable observation. She has seen most of the other animals we talk about, at least at the zoo or the aqauarium. She has seen elephants, lions, meerkats, whales, sharks, birds, and countless other fun animals. But what is with these reclusive dinosaurs? There is no dinosaur display at the zoo. I told her that is good because they are awfully big and fast and scary, to which she agreed, “Yeah!” and did a big roar sound. I also told her they have a dinosaur skeleton on display at the airport, but that did not especially interest her.
She also seems to be grappling with the seemingly arbitrary distinction between girls and boys. This topic came up during dinner when her school friend Nathan was mentioned as being a boy. “Girls and boys. What’s that? That’s silly!” This one I could not readily explain other than to say that they’re all just kids. But she has a good point. Why do you have to specify someone’s gender every time? You might as well use different words for kids with different colored hair.
It is a strange and confusing world indeed.
We have not really even acknowledged Christmas 2007 so far at home. We have no Christmas tree set up yet, no presents piled up on display in the living room, or even wrapped, or even purchased yet. We have not even been playing Christmas music. This lack of Christmas spirit is not intentional; Christmas has just sneaked up on us this year. So today, to get our Christmas spirit kicked off, Kit had the idea to go see the Festival of Trees at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead.
We were hoping the Festival of Trees would be sort of like the Christmas Tree Forest that Kit used to go to in Corpus Christi. It turned out to be classier, smaller, and more subdued than the Corpus Christi version. It featured trees decorated up in the traditional style from several different countries, accompanied by a written explanation of Christmas traditions in that country. But it felt more like a display than a forest, and it did not exactly jump start our Christmas spirits.
So we moved on to explore the rest of the museum. Claire was especially excited to see the big, working toy train track. Along the track were little displays of things like ice skaters on a frozen pond, elves working at Santa’s toy factory, construction crews at work on the road beside the track, and countless other things to look at, each with a button to push to make them go. And best of all was the fact that Thomas the Train was running around and around the track. Things were definitely looking up.
After we saw every little thing on the train display, we went outside and came across an old kid-sized playhouse in the garden. Claire knew it was made just for her, and she went right in to explore. She explored each of the three rooms and then made herself comfortable on the little kid-sized wicker sofa. Kit and I mostly stayed outside, letting Claire explore as we chatted about little things like where the heck we will be living in two years, what jobs will we both have, who is going to be president, and other basic unknowns of the relatively near future.
Over our chatter, Claire was sticking her head out of the playhouse’s front window, looking especially cute in her little green Christmas dress, saying what we could best make out as, “You wanna cumbo?” or just “Cumbo!” We replied, “What’s a cumbo?”, but Claire just smiled and kept saying it.
Finally, when Claire said, “You want cheese?” Kit put it together. Claire was asking if we wanted a “combo”, and she was acting like she was a lady at the drive-through window at Wendy’s or McDonald’s, where they always say, “You want to make that a combo?” or “You want cheese with that?” when you place an order. Kit and I were cracking up, because Claire did this with such as big smile on her face but was also trying to act serious, like she really did want to know if we wanted the combo. At least she did not ask us to “biggie size” it for only 39 cents more.Claire may have broken her first heart today. It happened on the sidewalk in front of the Carter’s baby clothing store in Sandy Springs. That is where Claire left a 15 month old boy crying on the sidewalk, not because she hit him or bit him, or because he had skinned his knee. He was crying because Claire was leaving, and he wanted her to come back.
My mom and dad (Noni and Granda Phil!) were in town for the weekend to get a Claire fix to hold them until Thanksgiving. We all took a rare trip OTP (Outside the Perimeter) to the Carter’s store near Perimeter Mall to find Claire some new pajamas. Her venerable old ones had served us well but were finally starting to get too small.
Fresh off a fun lunch at La Madeleine, we headed to Carter’s. Kit sorted through the PJ’s while I kept an eye on the kid. Claire was pretty happy to be out and about, and was in a playful, chatty mood. She sorted through the floor-level clothes racks repeatedly saying “How cuuuute!” and then pointing at the tags and saying, “It’s twenty months!” (even though the tag actually said 24 months. I mean, get with it, kid!) As I checked out, Kit tended to Claire, who was happily playing with some small stuffed toys in the back.
As we all left the store and were on the wide sidewalk walking towards the car, a little toddler boy was heading towards the store with his parents and gramma. Claire ran forward and jumped right in front of the boy, patted herself on the chest, and declared, “This is Claire! Nice shoes!”
This little display just about floored all of us, including the little boy’s parents. The boy was shocked and speechless. Claire then proceeded to pull out all her tricks as everyone watched on. She sang parts of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Wheels on the Bus as she danced and spun around. She ran around and tried to do some hopping, although that was less successful. She gave a heartfelt but largely unintelligible monologue. As her finale, she patiently recited the entire alphabet, almost flawlessly. The boy’s mom said, “Oh my god! Is she saying the alphabet?” The little boy watched Claire this whole time, engrossed, with his mouth half open.
Finally I had to pick Claire up since it seemed like she was just starting to show off at this point. We talked for a bit with the boy’s parents. The boy was 15 months old and was named Conner. They were in “the city” for the day to do some shopping. Little Conner did not have any brothers or sisters and stayed at home with his mom every day, so he had not been exposed to many other little kids. Maybe he would have been fascinated with Claire even if she had not put on such a show. But I felt a little bad for him because it seemed like his mom was thinking, “Why can’t Conner do that?” Either that or, “Them city kids is smart.” Just kidding. Anyways, we tried to explain that Claire was barely even talking at 15 months.
Eventually, we had to part ways. As we walked off, Claire looked back, waved, and said “Bye Conner!” Then she said quietly just to me and Kit, “That was fun.” At this point we heard Conner crying. Looking back, he was trying to run towards Claire, and his parents were trying to grab him. I think he wanted to see Claire’s second act.
Now that I have finally written this up, a couple of weeks later, we still talk about Conner occasionally. Sometimes Claire lists him along with her other friends, like Grace and Reese and the kids from school. She even named her new wiggling pig head toy after him. So I guess Conner made an impact on Claire too.
Most of Claire’s conversations still sound like this one today: “Baby Davis. Crying. Gracie. Infinity and beyond!” It is sort of a loose stream of consciousness monologue. In this case, Clair is noting Baby Davis’ common practice of crying, something which she sometimes imitates as “Waaaa! Waaaa!” Caire goes on to notate her other two main weekday companions, Grace of course, and Reese doing Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story.
But Claire is occasionally involving us in real conversations lately. She had this discussion with her Mom while getting ready for her bath last night.
Claire: Mommy, do it!
Kit: Do what?
Claire: Toby!
Kit: Who’s Toby?
Claire: I dunno!
And then she giggles and storms down the hall, returning a minute later to reiterate, “Toby! Toby!” Kit and I, by the way, have no idea who Toby is, but we were rolling on the floor laughing after this exchange. (Editor’s note: We later discovered that Toby is a blond four year old boy in Reese’s class who Claire thinks is especially funny.)
Claire is also forming more substantial sentences. This week when I was picking her up from Grace, Claire carried a book over to Baby Davis and proclaimed, “I’ll read it to Baby Davis” rather than just something like, “Read baby Davis.” Another example is if I walk out of the room, she’ll sometimes say, “Daddy’s coming back.” And today (Sunday), Claire was looking at a picture of herself with Reese and Grace and announced, “I’ll see Gracie tomorrow.” She may actually understand the idea of tomorrow and the basic schedule of two days at home and then back to Grace. On the other hand, she seems to invoke “tomorrow” to mean more or less the same thing as “later”, but a little stronger, like “more later”.
Claire sometimes even talks about her emotions. A few weeks ago, she walked into the living room after a bad wakeup from a nap, and with her lips puckered, she quietly said, “Sad” and then walked away. Yesterday in the car she was having a small fit because we took her drink away from her, and she said, “I’m crying.” And after a brief struggle this morning over changing out of her pajamas and into real clothes, she actually said, “I’m sorry. It’s okay.” The funny thing is that when she says something like this, that she is sad or crying or sorry, she almost always calms down immediately. It is almost like she is soothing herself. Hey, whatever works!
Claire has been elevating her talking to the next level lately. She used to say mostly single words about things and people, like “blanket” or “Gracie”. Now she is sometimes speaking in actual sentences. If she spills her drink, she’ll say “I spilled it.” Dropping something, she’ll say, “I dropped it.” If she wants a book that is out of reach, she says “I have it.” That last one sounds kind of rude in a way, but I think she picked it up from me asking her to give us something she has, like a flashlight. I normally say, “Can I have it?” as I hold out my hands. She even told Kit, “I love you” the other night out of the blue.
I guess this means that one day I will have a conversation with Claire over breakfast beyond the current standard, “Pancake. Table. Reesie. Goergie.” But what else could there possibly be to talk about?
She is also “messing up” fewer words, which she does so cutely. Sadly, flamingos are no longer “‘mingos”. I think she was onto something with her “mingos”. We call aligators “gators”, right? And “ome-ne-ne” has largely been replaced by the technically more correct, “Open it”. She is even sort of counting now. Somehow a game evolved where we spread the phonebooks out on the kitchen floor in a crooked line, and Claire steps from one to another. As she steps, Kit and I count, “Oooone. Twooooo. Threeeeee…” Claire has picked this up and will usually repeat the number, and sometimes even say the next number before we do: “Fooooooour” That just kills Kit and me.
But happily, she does not say everything perfectly yet. Here are some things that she still says funny. I wanted to get these down before she fixes these too.
Today did not start off well. I woke up at 5:15 to the sound of beeping in the living room and downstairs. The UPS battery backups were complaining that the power was out (again). It was an overcast night, and the house was pitch dark; I could not even see my hand in front of my face. But I had a small flashlight right by the bed, and I quietly roamed around the house turning off the beeping batteries. I even made it back to bed without waking anyone up.
Fifteen minutes later, as I was trying to get back to sleep, Claire started calmly saying from her room, “Eyeball. Eyeball.” At first this seemed like an odd thing to say. But I figured out what she meant pretty quickly. Normally if she hurts something or if something is not quite right, she will simply say the name of the offended body part, like saying “finger” if she were to hurt her finger. She did not sound panicked this morning, so I figured her actual eyeballs were okay. She must have been complaining that she could not see anything at all in the pitch dark, and maybe she was afraid here eyeballs were not working. I was impressed how calm she stayed when she suddenly realized she was, well, blind, and that she figured out a way to tell me that she could not see. I took her back to our room since it was still completely dark in the house and I did not want her to be scared.
We could not get her back to sleep since it was almost time for her to wake up anyways. But she laid down at the foot of our bed, asked for her blanket, pulled it over herself, and twice proclaimed “Sleepy time”. She rested there, but did not sleep, for a little while. But by 6:00 am, she was off the bed and wandering down the hall to gather toy animals from around the house. Pretty soon she was asking for pancakes. So our day started a little early, but luckily we got the power back within about an hour, and everyone was happy and safe.
Claire has developed a couple of catch phrases lately.
The first one she stumbled upon accidentally when she randomly said something like “Stay safe!” over dinner one night. She said it sort of seriously, but with a little grin, and looked at us for a reaction. Of course, we were rolling around laughing. The other phrase she likes is “Take it easy”, which I occasionally say if she gets worked up about something, like splashing her bath water too much or redistributing all her socks around the house. One day I said it, and she repeated it back to me with flourish. “Takeiteasy!” she said as sort of a single word.
She says both of these phrases a lot now, at least as a parlor trick if we remind her of them, and she usually says them back to back. It probably cracks me and Kit up more than anyone. Kit has started singing the Eagles song “Take it easy” to get Claire going.
We’ll finish with a message from Claire:
“Stay safe!”
“Takeiteasy!”
McG Kids 