Edit: Oops, I just noticed that Mama already put this one in as a comment to the other post. She hears “hatchee boats.” Anyway, it’s so amusing that I think it deserves its own post.

But, being still not quite yet two, she does have some amusing verbal misfires still, including:

• Bathing soup (bathing suit)
• Lego room (living room, and accurate since that’s where we keep the Lego’s)
• Mix phoot (mixed fruit, the little Del Monte fruit cups)
• Aunti Mock-it (Aunt Margaret)

And my current favorite:

Yes, that’s Faux Dooda for smoked gouda. We verified tonight that anything that starts with “sm” she starts with an “f” sound. It worked with smokin and smock, but then when I tried “smart,” she started to get wise to me.

Siena walked a few steps, and said, “Ice cream. It says ice cream.”

A pause.

“Can I have some ice cream?”

Darn, this is one of the downsides of our nearly-five-year-old being able to read a good many words now.

• I love you, X (where X = daddy, mommy, Siena, Barley, etc.)
• Daddy tickle Thalia
• Siena help Thalia jacket
• I want a waffle

We especially like that first one.

She also can almost say the entire alphabet, and has come very close to counting from one to twenty. She gets confused in the teens.

On the downside, she has been giving Mama a stream of annoying fits getting out of the bath, trying to change diapers, and so forth. She doesn’t give me these problems, only Mama, so we are trying to figure out what is different or where the problem is.

As we read certain books, like Museum ABC, that have lots of pictures of different objects, she has begun to point at things (which she used to do) and say, “Whazzat?” Asking what something is is new just in the past few weeks. (She has also started asking “Why?” to certain statements, which is amusing because who knows what she can understand of answers to that kind of causal analysis.)

Museum ABC in particular is funny because each page says something like “N is for Nose” and on the facing page shows four works of art that demonstrate the object, in this case four noses. Our dialog goes like this:

Daddy: N is for Nose.

Thalia: Whazzat? (Pointing at one nose)

Daddy: A nose.

Thalia: Whazzat? (at another)

Daddy: A nose.

Thalia: Whazzat? (at the third)

Daddy: That’s a nose.

Thalia: Whazzat? (at the final one)

Daddy: And another nose.

And the cricket? Whazzat is very close to “Howzat,” which is an abbreviated form of a cricketer’s appeal to an umpire, “How was that?” (See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howzat.)

For some reason unbeknownst to me, she has two toothbrushes. One is predominately blue, and the other is predominately yellow. Every time we go to brush teeth, she gets to decide whether she wants the blue one or the yellow one (or, in her early days of naming colors, the blue one or the other “blue” one).

Naturally, one night she asked for the “blue” one, and as I reached for the real blue one, she started to kick, said, “nooo” and then, “yellow!”

Among fans of Monty Python and Sir Galahad, there was much rejoicing! yaaaaay….

* Note: In honor of our younger and/or more puritanical audience and the Grammy Awards and the Recording Academy, the title of this post has been modified in a Cee Lo Green manner.

Thalia of course is saying many things now, building longer and longer sentences like “I want that” and “What is it?” She has always been a good parrot, and often says almost anything you say to her back, sometimes with repetitive vigor, such as when Nonna had her saying, “Buongiorno” over and over. I imagine Mo would have a field day with “Donut! Donut!”

Last week at school, shortly before I picked the girls up, a fire truck went passed their playground while they were outside. Thalia’s teacher Lisa told the kids what it was, and they started wondering where it had gone. “Where’d the fire truck go?”

Well, Thalia liked the phrase “fire truck” apparently, and was saying (some might say, shouting) it over and over, but unfortunately her little mouth and tongue can’t quite work through the complexities of starting one word with an “F” sound and then quickly starting another word with a “TR” sound. So instead she just makes it alliterative, and we end up with a slightly apologetic teacher, a laughing daddy, and our sanitized post title.

Last Sunday we were at our usual Sunday dinner hang out (NYAJ, of course). Thalia and Siena were splitting the kid’s pizza. I was having the chipotle chicken wanton salad (delish), and Mama had one of the best grilled mozzarella and tomato sandwiches this side (or perhaps either side) of the Mississippi, accompanied with tasty fries.

Thalia’s not been eating well of late, which is to say she hasn’t been packing it in and instead is eating presumably normal meals now, though sometimes light on the meat and heavy on the veggies, but who can complain at that, and she was just picking at her slice of pizza. (My claim is that she’s going through a growth lull.) Mama finished her sandwich but not her fries, and passed her plate over to me. Thalia made her usual proclamation of, “All done! All done!” but I took one of the fries, held it up in front of her face, and said, “Do you want a french fry?”

She looked at the fry, her eyes got very round and bright, and she said, “ooooh” and then, after a pregnant pause, “yeaaaah.” Mama and I just started howling; she said that what ran through her mind was, “There’s no way Thalia is just about to say yeah.”

It was one of those moments were I wish I had a video camera on the kids at all times, because I likely won’t capture her reaction like that again. Maybe I should hire a full-time paparazzi to follow the girls around to capture those great little moments. It would also get them prepared for the future. Right?

• More book
• Puppy barking
• Barley hungry
• No daddy

She can say probably around 40-45 words, maybe more, and can parrot back most anything we say to her, though it sounds quite different when it comes out of her mouth. She only just the other day started saying “f” properly. Her request for “water” is coming out like “warley” and I often think she’s asking about the dog and not refreshment. Mama is keeping a list of words she knows, which I really should copy here.