My Favorite Jack-isms

Now that Jack's a near constant chatterbox, he's got some wonderful phrases.  It's interesting to see him trying as hard as he is to communicate.  Generally he gets his message through.  The one glaring exception is that we're still baffled about what name he's given to the clips for my hot rollers.  He uses the same word for them every time he points them out, but we can't figure out what he's saying!  It's rather long and German-sounding in its compound name structure, which is fitting given his apparent conviction about their dual use.  I have the kind of clip that looks like an extra large bobby pin, and Jack's convinced that they not only hold the rollers in my hair (he's seen and attempted to imitate that) but that they also unlock doors.  It is not an exaggeration to say that at any given time half of our upstairs doors have curler pins sticking out of them.  

 

So I thought I'd share some of my favorite Jack-isms with you before I forget how much I love them.

"'Ere go, Momma."  Translated: "Here you go, Momma."  He says this any time he hands me anything, whether I want it or not.  Frequently he says it when handing me infinitesimally small crumbs that have fallen from his plate to the table or from his food to his carseat.

"WHOOOO! 'Nudda steet." Translated: "The firetruck went down another street."  This comes out any time we hear any kind of siren but don't see an emergency vehicle.  The second half of his statement is always said very reassuringly, as if I had been terribly concerned about the absent firetruck and he's trying to comfort me.

"Doww Pay?" Translated: "May I get down from the table to play?"  He says this with an incredibly earnest look, as if he's asking for the most wonderful favor in the world.

"Pay???  (Folds hands in prayer, makes a makeshift sign of the cross) Amen. EAT!"  Jack is extremely consistent about saying mealtime prayers.  So much so that he'll remind me to pray when we're eating in a restaurant (which brings up interesting issues for me--continue to do what we always do or avoid any outward sign so as not to seem showily pious?).  The sign of the cross is a work in progress.  Jack gets that it starts on his forehead, but after that it's generally just three taps on the middle of his chest.  Also, I'm fairly sure that Jack thinks the prayer doesn't end with the "Amen" but with the "EAT!"  We don't know where that came from.

"Jack's bah-bah NOW!"  A few months ago, in an effort to get Jack to give up his binky (I've since somewhat suspended this effort), I started saying, "It's Momma's bah-bah now!" every morning when we playfully fought for control of his prized pacifier(s).  Now anytime Jack finally finds and grabs a binky, he cheerfully proclaims that it's his.  It also serves as a template for anything else he happens to find; i.e., "Jack's new bike NOW!"

"Okay, Mommeeeee!"  It's amazing to see Jack's sense of humor develop.  He's discovered that I'm not all that crazy about being called Mommy.  I thought I would be, but somehow when he got stuck on Momma for a few months, it really grew on me and sounds so much sweeter to me now.  So any time he wants to tease me or get me to chase him, he calls me Mommeeee, squeals a giggle, and races away.

"Paygown!  Maddie, KayKay Baby, Neeeesha?"  Translated: "There's the playground!  Are we meeting Maddie and Kaleb the baby and Neesha (our friends) there?"  It's been almost a month since we've seen these friends, but Jack talks about them incessantly.  Any time we see or talk about a playground he assures me that we will see them there.  Any time someone asks where he's going, Jack will invariably answer that he's going to see them.

This is closely related to the narrative, "Choo choo, MeyMey, Phoenic, no MurrDee" in which Jack recounts his trip on the zoo train with his friends Meghan and Phoenix, an outing which his friend Murray was expected to attend but did not in fact make.

"Daddy fall down, Jack fall down, uh-huh.  Bah-daid.  Mwah!  Bad gate, bad gate! Okay, okay." This story is actually a little more complex than a simple sentence interpretation.  A few weeks ago Ben was carrying Jack over the babygate at the top of the stairs when Ben lost his balance and the two of them landed hard on the other side.  It was actually pretty traumatic.  Ben had a severely bruised knee for about two weeks and is just getting over his (irrational but no less real) guilt.  Jack bit his front lip and his cheek hard and cracked a portion of one of his teeth off.  We have yet to figure out which tooth was the damaged one, but after an emergency trip to the dentist (whom Jack had not yet officially visited), we were assured that he would be fine.  Nonetheless, it was scary and we castigated the gate when we got home.  Repeatedly.  The middle part of the sequence tells about how he got a band-aid and a kiss to feel better.

"Hey, Oh! Reh Ha Chiddy Peppa CD!?"  Jack loves those Chili Peppers.  He now asks for them by name and can sing half of "Snow."  Good mom for exposing him to many musical genres or bad mom for letting him listen to rock music at such a tender age?

"Beept, beept!" (while walking backwards)  Several months ago Jack saw a firetruck backing into the fire station and heard it beeping.  He said "Beep?" and I responded, "Yes, that fire truck beeped as it was backing up."  Now Jack thinks that the present tense of to beep is not beep but  beeped.  And he makes that noise any time anything goes backwards.  Including himself.

"Momma: Kiddy Me!" and "Momma: Sear-ly?" Translated: "Momma, you're so funny to say 'Are you kidding me!?' and 'Seriously!?' again." Last week I had several mornings during which everything seemed to go comically wrong.  Ben couldn't get one car to start, so he took the other one (which I had already filled with Jack and my thinks for the day)--finally got the other car to start and realized Ben had left without taking my purse out of his car--finally got to the tailor's where my bridesmaid dress was waiting for me (drove VERY slowly and carefully, had already paid for the alterations), and the tailor had just stepped out for a few (20) minutes.  Plus there was the day of 4 grocery stores and a disappointing tux rental visit mentioned in the last post.  Thus, a seemingly endless stream of "Seriously!?"s and "Are you kidding me!?"s spewed out of my mouth last week.

I'm now extremely grateful for having long ago decided to censor my language so that I'm now in the habit of using completely G-Rated phrases any time Jack might possibly be in earshot.  It's a good thing I've finally perfected that art, because this time Jack immediately repeated my words as if they were the funniest things ever.

But by far my favorite Jackism of all is "I you, Momma!"  He leaves out the operative L word, but the sentiment is absolutely there, and I love it.

Congratulations to Aunt Rachel and Uncle Chad

The past few weeks have been very busy around our house.  Ben was working on a massive deal at work (Energizer bought SC Johnson), which meant I was a mostly-single parent for a few weeks, even more so than while we were in London.  It was not fun for any of us, and we're all really looking forward to having a weekend alone together again starting this Friday.

But more importantly, we were busy because my little sister got married on Saturday!  To be honest, I didn't have to do all that much, even though I was the Matron of Honor (seriously, couldn't they just call all of us "maids"?  "Matron" is so, so awful!).  Nonna had pretty much everything covered, and two of Rachel's friends took care of the bachelorette party.  But even just the packing for a long weekend and taking the train to Nonna and Pops' with Jack on Thursday morning took a bit of thoughtful planning.  On one truly annoying afternoon I was led to believe that Jack's tux wouldn't be here in time and I visited four different grocery stores trying to find exactly the type of natural-fruit raspberry jam that Nonna wanted to use in the wedding cake--which she amazingly and to great results made herself!

All three of us were in the wedding party; Ben was an usher and Jack was one of three ring bearers.  Ben helped seat a full church of over 250 people.  I managed not to trip while walking down the aisle or to smear my makeup horribly with tears.  And Jack did a tremendous job.  Jack and I had practiced for a week or so, using finger puppets and Little Tykes people to act out the wedding, and we had picked up a few books about weddings from the library.  Thankfully, Rachel and Chad had decided from the start that the children in the wedding should sit with their families during the ceremony instead of standing up front the entire time.  That alone took a ton of pressure off.

The night of the rehearsal Jack went up and down the aisle several times without issue.  At the actual wedding he seemed a little surprised to see so many people sitting in the pews, which makes sense but is something I would never have thought about.  About halfway down the aisle he started peeking into every row, looking for Nonna, who, as mother of the bride, was of course seated in the front row.  So it took a little while for Jack to get to the front, but he did it (!) and the whole congregation seemed amused by the process.  At the reception someone pointed out that Jack had looked a little like a politician working a ropeline.  I cringed slightly, silently hoping he can avoid that fate... 

The wedding turned out beautifully.  Rachel has terrific style and picked out very flattering bridesmaids' dresses and shoes so cute that I anticipate wearing them at least once a week this summer.  The music was jaw-dropping; our former piano teacher played the organ, our cousin Julie's boyfriend brought tears to my eyes during Trumpet Voluntary, and friends of the family played cello and harp during the seating of guests.  And Rachel looked stunningly beautiful in her gorgeous dress.  Seriously, pictures will express it much better than I could describe it.

Unfortunately since we were all incredibly busy the day of the wedding, we didn't get around to taking any pictures with our camera.  The closest I can get to pictures right now is their engagement announcement in my hometown newspaper and their wedding website (see that for one of the worst post-poodle-hair pictures of me ever! Gotta get a new batch of pictures together, Sister!), but I promise that when the photographers have the pictures ready I will post plenty of them here.

Until then, I hope Aunt Rachel and Uncle Chad are having a great time in St. Lucia.  Congratulations!

Oh, and in key Jackson girl fashion, the wedding has again overshadowed Uncle Tyler's birthday.  I'm by far more guilty of doing that than Rachel, having had two graduations (possibly three--I can't remember when my high school graduation was) within a day of his birthday.  And another time I arranged for Tyler to travel to London to see my newborn and had him returning home just hours before he turned 21.  Twenty-one doesn't seem quite as impressive after spending a week in a country with a drinking age of 18.  So, in rare fashion, here's a birthday shout out to Uncle Tyler for tomorrow.  Happy 23!

My New Naptime Obsession

When Jack was a newborn, my favorite way to spend his naptime was to go to sleep myself.  I embraced the advice to sleep when your baby sleeps, letting laundry go undone and dishes sit in the sink, sometimes for an embarrassingly disgusting length of time.  When Jack reached about seven months or so and was (finally!) only waking up 3-4 times a night, my naptime treat became watching Desperate Housewives and Daily Show reruns while drinking a Diet Coke and eating chocolate.  While I still greatly enjoy that setup, today it has been usurped as my favorite naptime pastime. 

Slate.com, my long-time favorite online magazine, has just launched a new for-women sister site called Double X, and I am obsessed.  For about a year and a half I've followed religiously the conversations on the XX Factor, Slate's women's blog, and now it's evolved from a blog into a full website.  I couldn't be more thrilled at the prospect of spending Jack's naps reading the brilliant insights of these incredible journalists.  Much more mind-expanding than Desperate Housewives reruns.  I predict a rapid decline in the cleanliness of our home.

Even though I, as an over-educated, unemployed/stay-at-home mother, am occasionally (okay, repeatedly) attacked through varying levels of chastisement in many of their articles, I love the idea of an online home for intelligent conversation about news, women's issues, and families with other women.  This article about the failures of feminism (or maybe just the lack of a definitive solution to Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name," described in The Feminine Mystique) had me intrigued today.  It describes some of the conflict I feel between wanting to be a "perfect" mom/wife and recognizing we could all use a little relaxation of standards in the name of both feminism and sanity.  A brief quote:

"If, as Joan Didion noted of the women’s movement in 1972, “to make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them,” today you need the women who spend their days buying organic eggs from Whole Foods and mommy-blogging about the frittatas they made for their kids to question seriously their life choices. This is a much harder proposition than merely claiming membership among the oppressed. The generations of women now in their twenties, thirties, and forties were raised to believe they could be anything and do anything they wanted to do. Now that they have educations, jobs, husbands, and children, they are finding that doing all of these things well isn’t so simple. They don’t suffer from a problem that has no name so much as they nurture resentments with no obvious cause.

In the end, the modern day querelle des femmes often reveals more about class (and status anxiety) than it does about the particular experience of being female. It is the maddening demands of an ever more competitive meritocracy, and not the malevolence of men, that challenges these daughters of the second wave." 

Every time I read an article like this I face another interesting conflict--do I attempt to write something publishable on mommy feminism, or is that market flooded already with women more eloquent than I am? 

Good Neighbors

With the wonderful summery weather we've had the past few days, I've realized once again how much I love our little neighborhood.  Brentwood is a cute little town of 7,000 right in the middle of the inner suburbs of St. Louis.  I say "inner suburbs" because urban sprawl here really is horrific--it's not as bad as D.C. or Houston, but there are actually people who commute 40 miles or more to downtown without going through a bit of rural area.  On our trips to visit Nonna and Pops, it takes almost an hour before we officially leave St. Louis's outer suburbs.  And even where we are it takes Ben over half an hour to drive to work, which makes me feel as if we're living way out in the boonies, since Ben's London commute consisted of a 7 minute walk by some of the city's tallest buildings.  The preppiness of it all also occasionally gets to me when I realize that there are 4 identical white luxury SUVs in line at our local Starbucks driveup window or when I see moms at the park dressed in skirts and with lipstick on(!) while their children play around them in Strasburg Children clothes.  And I completely don't get the monogramming fanaticism--seriously, I've seen it on cars, on baby bibs!?  Didn't even J.Crew ditch that fad as too preppy about five years ago?  But, again, good outweighs bad.

But, being relatively out of the hideousness of McMansion exurbia, Brentwood's a pretty nice area.  The public elementary school is literally six houses away, and our favorite park is less than a mile's walk through a tree-lined neighborhood.  There are a few businesses that we can walk to: the library, fire station (this is key for Jack), dry cleaner's, pharmacy, our insurance company, Whole Foods, Panera, Starbucks.  If the streets were set up a little more walker-friendly, we could even make it on foot to Target!  

The best thing about our new home is our neighbors.  We're in a row of 10 newly built houses that share a common back alley private drive that leads to all our garages.  In those 10 houses live 13 children between 7 months and 10 years of age!  So as you can imagine, the alley in back is home to frequent bike races and impromptu soccer matches.  I'd imagine it's like going back in time 50 years to stickball game years.  Except that the parents join in, too, jumping in and out of the games and talking to one another.  Saturday we walked outside and were greeted with drink and barbecue offers from both our neighbors whose kids were playing in the sprinkler and those who were making their first attempts at gardening.

It's also reassuring to know our neighbors so well when I read a story like this one that was briefly on CNN.com earlier today.  As I incredulously read the story to Ben, his jaw dropped and he said, "I could totally see Jack doing that!"  Me too.  And let me give you an example of exactly why we could see that happening.

Some background: although the big boy bed thing is going fairly well (our featherbed has been returned to its intended use and we've yet to have a falling out incident), Jack does like to get up and crack his door open after we've put him to bed.  We've now gotten used to hearing the creak of his door a few minutes after lights out.  He then spends at least 15 minutes jabbering away to himself before falling asleep; generally he recounts highlights of his day (presumably for the benefit of Waddle Waddle and Little Teddy), then ends by giving his animals kisses and singing the last line of his lullaby, "Goodnight Jack, we love you."

Saturday night, however, Jack seemed to go to sleep rather quickly.  It was a little late and he had spent a lot of time playing outside in the sun, so we chalked the lack of noise up to exhaustion.  In the process of opening the door, however, Jack kicks off all his covers, and he's still learning how to cover himself back up, so I've recently made a habit of stopping by his room before I go to sleep and straightening his covers.  I find it really sweet.  But when I went in to do that on Saturday, Jack wasn't in bed.  I patted the blankets and pulled them off the bed in shock and had a brief moment of panic before I realized exactly where he was.  When we weren't outside playing in the sun, we spent a good portion of Saturday in our guest room.  We had a huge buildup of laundry to fold and I (embarrassingly) still hadn't washed the sheets from our Easter Grammy and Granddad visit, so we spent a lot of time playing on the twin-sized guest bed with the trundle underneath it pulled halfway out so that Jack could jump up on the bed, too.  

Jack had apparently tried to recreate our afternoon fun, because there he was, snoozing away sans sheets, with no blanket, no pillowcase, not even a stuffed animal for companionship, just three bah-bahs (pacifiers, one for each hand and one for his mouth, on constant rotation) on the "Nonna Pops bed," as he had dubbed it earlier in the day.  We carried him back to his room, but Sunday morning, instead of wanting to snuggle in our bed for a while after waking up (as usual), Jack urged us to go to the guest room instead.  We politely declined.  At least we have an inkling that,  should he have a baby brother or sister who would need to be in a crib and in the nursery closer to our room, changing rooms and moving to a true big boy bed will not cause much emotional trauma for Jack.

Here's to hoping that by the time Jack has siblings who can toddle along after him he'll have turned his leadership skills toward more productive endeavors so that we won't end up on the CNN ticker on a slow news day.

And Happy Birthday to Daddy!

And the birthday madness continued, only to end today.  Jack's birthday is not only (generally) close to Easter, but it's just a week and a half before Ben's.  So on Monday, after a final birthday party for Jack two days before at Nonna and Pops's house, we were at the grocery store buying ingredients for Ben's birthday cake.  I was, as usual, attempting to keep Jack happily in the cart (as opposed to unhappily throwing himself out of the cart) by using my standby tactic of talking his ear off so he doesn't have time to process anything else (Uncle Tyler, you can keep your Nonna comparison jokes to yourself, thank you very much!).  So I was explaining to him what we were getting and why we were having yet another birthday cake.  Jack turned to me and said, "Hap Birday Jack all done.  Hap Birday Daddy."  

Actually, I should qualify this by explaining that Jack wasn't just saying this to me but to the entire grocery store.  You see, he doesn't actually say, "Hap Birday"; he sings it at the top of his lungs.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I don't think he understands that the sentiment may also be adequately expressed in spoken words.  

I'll attempt to capture the singing on video tomorrow and repost it here, although I have two concerns about doing this: 1) whether Jack could possibly refrain from looking at the camera long enough for him to sing the entire song or even a representative snippet, and 2) whether such a post would require paying royalties.  I'm going for the defense of tenuous connection to the actual tune and lyrics given a 2-year-old's vocal development.  That is unless any of my litigation friends have strong arguments against it.

Regardless, I'm indescribably glad that my wonderful husband and best friend was born 29 years ago today.