Talkin' 'Bout

Both of my kiddos are sick with yucky colds today. Poor sweet babies. Thank God for Puffs With Lotion (my husband's preferred brand) and bulb syringes. (Speaking of which, am I the only mom who has about 30 of those things? I've never bought a single one, and yet they keep accumulating in the kids' medicine cabinet. Most of them are the traditional blue with the long, narrow tip, but another is a great example of poor product design. It doesn't have a long, narrow tip--it has a... a gaping cavity. A kid would have to have nostrils the size of man-hole covers for this thing to work.)

I wanted to post about some of the things that Meggy says these days. She does talk quite a bit and is starting to have some trademark phrases. We like how she always says, "Okay?" after she falls down. This is not, as you might guess, to ask herself whether or not she is okay. It is to prompt Mommy and Daddy to ask if she is okay. Which she always is, if she's asking the question. But still, parents have the duty to inquire, as Meg is quick to remind us.

We love her current name for Matthew, which is "Diss" (This). Dave thinks it comes from the two of us always asking, " Meg, who's this?" as we point at her little brother. Well, now we know who "This" is. This is This.

One of her signature expressions is in this post's title: "talkin' 'bout". When Matthew first began to coo, Dave and I would look at Meg and say, "Matthew's talking, Meg!" Pretty soon Meg started to say it all by herself whenever Matthew made a sound: "Talkin'!" Then a few weeks ago, when Meg and Matthew were both hanging out with their Daddy, Meg made her usual observation about her brother: "Talkin'!".

And Dave replied, "Yes, Meg, he's talking! What's he talking about?" Well, Meg didn't have an answer for the question, but ever since then, if Matthew coos, she always says, "Talkin' 'bout?".

Our favorite invented expression of Meg's is "kissygawa". Kissygawa is a sort of game she plays, usually at the dinner table. "Kissygawa," she will say quickly, looking at Dave; then she whips her head around to look at me. "Kissygawa," she repeats. Then she whips her head back to Dave and blows him a quick kiss; then she whips her head back to me and blows me a kiss. The whole thing takes two seconds, if that. "Kissygawa! Kissygawa! (Kiss, kiss.)" (She says "kissygawa" so fast that you wouldn't be able to understand her if you weren't steeped in Megisms.)

Meg's also begun counting to ten. She doesn't fully understand what numbers and counting are, but she can say all ten numbers in sequence. We were shocked the first time she did it. Dave was changing her diaper before bed one night, and Meg was repeatedly counting to three, which she had started to do just a few days before this. Then one time she got to three and didn't stop! Mommy and Daddy were (and are) duly impressed by this achievement. Although I have to say that recently, she often skips the first five numbers. Six, seven, eight, nine and ten seem to be her favorites. Or to put it as she would: "Seeex, seh-wen, eet, nyyy, ten!"

Most exciting to me is the fact that Meg has memorized her first Bible verse, Colossians 3:20. (It could be argued that her first verse was really Psalms 63:5, "My mouth will praise you with joyful lips." But she has never actually spoken those words; she learned them before she could speak with hand signs that I made up.)

Anyway, Colossians 3:20 says, "Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord." I started teaching this verse to her several weeks ago, thinking that it would be months before she would be able to repeat the words back to me (since few of them are in her normal vocabulary). But nope! The other day she surprised me by saying the whole thing by herself. "Children..." I said, prompting her. And Meg said, "Chinr, mmbay uh peh-tis ehhhh-eeee, iss pease Luh."

Yeah. Now that's what I'm talkin' about.