Mini Phases

Everyone always says, "It's just a phase", but Snappy has many adorable phases that I hope never go away. Like her complete obsession with her 13 month old cousin, her 2 year old BFF and her fat cat. (I admit I took advantage of her stalkerish love for that silly cat this morning, yelling "Ralphie, come watch. Snappy is going to poopie in the big girl potty!" It nearly worked.)

I feel I must start chronicling these phases because it occurs to me that they aren't going to last forever. For example, the "animal" phase where she had to sleep with, be with and carry an armload of stuffed animals at all times, is petering out. I can't say that I'll really miss that phase all that much because it was hard to get her out of the house since she couldn't hold all her treasures and walk down the stairs at the same time. Still, it made me laugh and I got some cute pictures.

Sigh. Oh well. Thankfully, she still sleeps with them:




Not pictured, but all, somehow also crammed in the crib with her: Peacock, baseball teddy bear, Janice, Big Dora, Little Dora, Sonic, Ming Ming, Other Ming Ming, sheep who wears a jacket, hula Spongebob, Mister Crabs, Gary, Hello Kitty, The Pigeon Book and the trio of multi-culti baby dolls that sleep at the foot of the crib.

Christmas Miracles...Bah Humbug! (Warning: Shmaltz)

I've been thinking about Christmas Miracles lately. Glide ran out of food bags for the first time ever yesterday. Innocent children are getting sick...and staying sick. An old lady died in an apartment fire on Nob Hill the other morning. It seems that if you really, really need a miracle, tough shit, you won't get one. (Unless by "miracle" you mean "dead ticket", then you can get all you need...in 1990.)I don't dare hope for miracles anymore. I've developed a painful, paranoid faux-Buddhist need to live in the moment lest I spend every moment worrying about the possibility of not outliving Snappy. The upside is that I've developed a faux-Buddhist appreciation for "The Moment".

Okay, this is going to sound like something I made up for shmaltz sake, but I didn't. I swear. My favorite Christmas present ever was a hairdryer. I was 12 or 13, and I was just getting into stuff like that. I really wanted a hairdryer, but I didn't say anything. I'm not sure why, but we didn't ask for gifts, but just hoped for the best. When it came to clothes, my mom was sure to by the ugliest thing to ever hang on a sale rack, but with everything else she was spot on...buying lots of fun toys when we were little and make-up for my sister and I and rock magazines for my brother when we were teens. I didn't ask for a hair dryer, but all my friends had them, they made lots of noise and provided big, fluffy hair that was the style at the time. After I had opened my presents, I eyed the beautiful Con-air 3 speed and said, "we got a lot of stuff this year." I don't remember, maybe we did, maybe we didn't, but I got a hairdryer, so, in my mind, I made out. My mother said, "no, I only spent about 25 bucks on each of you." I was floored. I was sure hairdryer alone must be worth at least 50 bucks. I didn't believe her.

Now, of course, I realize that it was our poorest Christmas ever. My mom was single and waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant. She had no money, no husband, a mortgaged house with a failing furnace, 3 kids, a bunch of cats and dogs and then, one 9.99 hairdryer bought at CVS had hit a homerun and became the best Christmas present ever. If that isn't a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.

More on the Cuteness

Runner ups:

Whoa, dude!

Oh dear! Oh my!

No cymbal crashes.

Oh mommy.

And, this is not so much a runner-up as it is an alternate number 1, everytime I wash her face or do something else she doesn't want me to do she says, "Help me Spiderman! Sling some webs.".

More Cute Stuff Snaps Does

Now that she's talking, the top ten cute things Snappy says has been compiled by a crack team of scientists.

10. Don't worry, unicorn.

9. Where's my Grouchy Monster?

8. The puma eats a snack.

7. Hello Jackhammer. I want to talk to you!

6. Weee! Woo hoo!

5. Don't swear.

4. I'm swearing!

3. Silly coffee maker/vacuum cleaner! What are you doing here?
(it must be noted that Snaps is terrified of the vacuum cleaner and the coffee maker.)

2. Don't cry anymore, Hello Kitty.

1. Hello.

Yeah. That's right. Hello. No, you don't understand, see, whenever Snappy is caught doing something she ought not to, she dances over to me and, doing an amazingly accurate imatation of a Monty Python housewife, says "Hellooooooooooo! Hi mum!"

Next up: the runner ups.

Snappy the Sailor Girl

So, since my last post was so sad...so so so sad...I thought I'd make it up to y'all by telling you this seriously hilarious story:

As you might know, Snappy has been in speech therapy for the past few months. It's been doing wonders for her vocabulary and grammar, but almost nothing for her pronunciation. (Which is why we're pretty darned sure that we're in for a second palate surgery...hence the sadness.) I told the speech therapist early on that I was afraid that when she did start talking, it'd be just a string of swear words, and he said, "yeah. That happens with these kids."

Makes sense, when you think about it. If your toddler isn't talking, then they don't repeat everything you say, if they don't repeat everything you say, you don't watch what you say because, even though you know you should, you don't get any negative reinforcement when you do swear (i.e. a little potty mouth running around the playground, shocking grannies). Parents are a lot like children. They too need positive and negative reinforcement.

And without it...well, let's just say that for a while now, I've suspected that Snappy has been saying F You! Now, I knew she'd been saying shit because she said it five times when I accidently dropped her Goldfish crackers into the cat's water dish. Hey, at least she used it correctly. But she was also, with quite the sneaky little gleam in her eye, saying something that sounded a lot like Uck OO. Hmm. What to do? I can't tell her not to swear if she's not swearing. So I had to tread lightly.

"Snappy, are you saying Achoo?"

"No," She said giggling. "Not achoo!"

"Are you saying Got you?"

That's when she squealed, "Uck you, La-ee!"

Ah ha. Oh yes. I know where she heard that. Many times. All over the city. From her mother, who thinks many ladies need to go uck themselves and has a hard time keeping her mouth shut when she encounters one. Oh boy.

I didn't know what to do then, but a few days later, at the grocery store, in the middle of a tantrum, I told Snappy she couldn't have some candy, and she screamed "Uck Oo! Uck Oo! Uck Oo!" It was strange. I found myself actually being glad that Snappy's 1st palate repair had left her with a palate too short to allow for proper pronunciation of plosives like p, b and good ol' F! Having the tantrumy child in the grocery store is one thing, having a filthy mouthed tantrum thrower is yet another. I hugged her, kissed the top of her head and said, "Oh Snappy, that's really naughty. You can't do that." She stopped.

I guess my days of swearing at ladies are over. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. Damn b words had it coming.

Baby gets the Blues

Yesterday, Snappy dug out Sneakers, the Seaside Cat and said, "I want to read kitty cat story." The kitty cat story? But Snappy, that story makes you cry. She just lowered her little eyebrows and said "I want the kitty cat story." A "serious business" face she reserves for asking for ice cream cones...and only for asking for asking for ice cream cones. Hm.

Well, maybe she's matured. After all, the kitty cat story made her cry when she was one and a half. She's nearly two and a half now. She plays intricate imagination games with her dolls and animals, she makes up wild stories about the owl, puma and Moll Moll, she sings Twinkle Twinkle Little star on the potty, she sits on a potty, she talks in full sentences, she answers questions in full sentences, she makes demands in full sentences, she swears! and she has trouble deciding whether to be a witch or a pirate for Halloween...such a grown-up problem. Such a big girl! Surely, she no longer cries when the kitty gets his paw pinched by the crab. Surely she's past that.

Apparently, she is not (and don't call her surely).

I don't pretend to be a child development expert, but I've noticed that at around 18 months or so, babies get the blues. Not all of them, but I've seen other kids her age cry at sad songs (why do baby music teachers ever even go near the key of D minor? Have they learned nothing from Spinal Tap?!). As slap happy and snappy go lucky as she most often was, Snappy was also a bit of a blues master herself. She cried at the sad songs in music class. She also cried when the rocket ship went up up up up and then down down down down in Yo Gabba Gabba, when the V Tarzan-yelled through the Bronx Zoo on Sesame Street, when Swiper got his swiping butt stuck in a bottle on Dora and of course, when a hapless black cat got his paw pinched by a vicious crab in one of her, otherwise, favorite books. And OH the pathos! Capital O capital H the PATHOS! Her mournful sobs once sent an entire playground of 3 year-olds into a chorus of sympathy crying after a big kid refused to let her stomp on his sand castle.

Actually, it was the playground incident that started me thinking. It was the way the whole 46th Avenue playground just stopped. The kids stopped to watch this little 1 1/2 year old cry, the older ones, choking back tears themselves, the younger ones crying right along with her. The parents stopped and watched their own kids. They seemed surprised by the stunning show of empathy. And probably these kids were more sensitive than your average sand sifter, but there was something about that moment...that seemed different...sadder than it should've been. Toddlers got their feeling hurt on that playground everyday. Why did Snappy seem to have a DEE-Vine right to the blues?

She certainly has a gift for it, even more so now that she can talk. Pairing her already heart-string-pulling sobs with lines like "he scared me!" when the cat hisses at her, "I'm sorry." when she thinks someone is mad at her and, the all time soul-smacking tear-tugging "I want to go home!." She waits to bust that little gem out for emergency situations: like clinic visits, doctor's appointments and banks without lolly-pops. "I want to go home". Such a great line! Classic to the human condition, completely knocked-up with emotion, as a song lyric, it rivals "Son, pack your things, I've come to take you home" and makes "I'm serious as cancer when I say rythmn is a dancer" look like a bucket of shit (hm...that's not really hard to do, is it?).

Oh, and now she changes it up and says things like, "He wants to go home". Like when Ruby and Louise are working on their first-aid badge for bunny scouts, and they wrap Max in bandages. Snappy points at him and says, "he wants to go home." I put two and two together. Max looked like he was at the doctor. Snappy thought the doctors office was a torture chamber and behaved as such when placed inside it. Snappy needed to go to the doctors office from time to time. Here, I thought was a perfect opportunity to discuss her feelings and apprehension about people who wear stethoscopes.

"Do you think Max is scared?" I asked, in my best mommy voice. Snappy thought about it and opened her mouth to speak, but what came out was the beginnings of a wail that was sure to be sadder than Sophie's Choice (a movie with a premise so sad, I refuse to watch it), The Things They Carried and every Disney movie ever made...had I not shut it down with a quick, " I meant, do you want a Popsicle? That's what I meant..Max is fine. Everything is fine. Lime or orange? Why not both?"

But yesterday, when she pointed to a picture of Sneakers in the back seat of a car and, on the verge of woeful wailing, said, "he wants to go home," I started to think that maybe, in this case, two and two make five. Snappy is two, she's not an idiot. She knows that cat doesn't want to go to the beach, any more than Max wants to play doctor with his sister and her crazy bunny friend or Swiper wants to get stuffed in a bottle. She knows that some asshole shoved that fox in that bottle...possibly the same one who decided it would be a good idea to take a cat to the ocean. And it makes her cry because she's been down that lonely road. And if she's smart enough to figure that out, she's smart enough to know that something is up when she hears mom and the speech therapist saying things like "second palate surgery" and "recovery time".

And if she is that smart, then she knows that if it were up to me, she'd never have the blues again. She'd have the grouchies, the angries, the tantrums and the just plain sads, but never the blues. But it's not. And she will.

Peek-a-boo!