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Pony: Winter is mental!
2.18.2008
I have said it before and I will say it again: this long and crazy winter is making us MENTAL. It is only mid-Feb and I am officially at my breaking point. Kiff and I have entered a zombified state. We take turns on the computer playing scrabulous. We eat starchy dinners in front of the television. We wipe G.'s snotty nose and have given up organizing the piles of wet-dog-smelling winter wearables in the front hall.
We grunt instead of speak, while looking outside at the grey sky and the umpteenth accumulated centimetre of snowfall and listen to weather forecasts calling for an "extreme winter storm warning" (which has a lovely poetry in the sound, even while it summons more indoor madness).
Yesterday I dropped a toy truck on my head. A heavy one. Don't ask how that happened, but I think I perforated something. Is cauliflower ear a medical term?
Gabriel probably can't remember going to parks, but his greatest joy came yesterday when the snow ploughs came and took "excess" snow off our street. For half an hour he was transfixed by their maneuvers and he still points at the window and babbles, as if telling the great epic tale of the "the day the big trucks came and took away some snow".
As for real words, he has not articulated much more than mama and dada, but he is signing up a storm: Milk. All done. Diaper. Socks. Apple. Monkey. Except I think he has conflated monkey and mommy, as he keeps looking at me and scratching his armpits.
In the elevator at work the other day, a guy I know asked about my son and I answered: "Great, but I think he has confused the sign for monkey and mommy - he keeps calling me monkey in sign language."
"Oh, yeah, man, I heard that if you teach them sign language, they will be slower to talk."
"Really? I read the opposite." I said, feeling somewhat rankled and defensive - a familiar reaction of parents who feel the thoroughness of their research questioned.
At this point, a young dude in the elevator who was decked out like a teenage fanboy, shifted his weight onto his other hip and added, gravely: "Yah, me too, man. I've heard it takes them longer to talk if you do sign language."
I have said this before, and I will say it again, but who's the monkey now, you might ask?
