Some he loves, like “Darn it!” Anytime anything slightly does not go his way, there’s a squeaky little “Darn it!” This should probably appall me, but instead I find it rather adorable. I mean, “Darn it” is an acceptable alternative to other particular phrases, right?
But even with the inclusion of this watered-down exclamation, Eamon still isn’t learning new words and phrases fast enough for his taste.
So he’s resorted to making them up.
Yesterday, for instance, he had a runny nose and kept shaking his head. Finally, he marched up to my mother and announced, “Nini! Bugs. Inna ear.”
A bit taken aback, my mother asked for further explanation.
Far too often, Eamon finds that he has to explain things to the adults around him, a tedious responsibility that has probably prompted the inclusion of “Darn it!” into his vocabulary.
“Bugs, Nini! In Eamon’s ear! BUGS!” Everyone knows that saying something again and louder is a perfectly valid method of further explanation here in America.
Later, my mom used the otoscope to check in Eamon’s ears, and while there were no 6-legged invertebrates having a tea party in there, there was some cloudy fluid. So yes, he has a slight cold. And yes, even though I had never thought about it that way before, that can feel like having small bugs flying around inside your ear.
Then this morning, Eamon informed me that in addition to his “Bugs inna ear” syndrome, he also had “Cookies inna nose!”
(On a side note, as I changed a poopy diaper, he also informed me that it was my job to “Take out cookies, Mommy! Take outta Eamon’s nose!” I explained that there are only so many gross bodily functions I can handle at one time, and he was on his own with the nose-cookies.)
Why cookies? Why bugs? How on earth should I know? Eamon has yet to reach that level of metacognition--or if he has, he has yet to be able to string it together using only one syllable words.
But despite his current lack of a robust vocabulary, the kid undoubtedly has a vibrant imagination.
At the mall last weekend, we stopped to look at one of his favorite sites: the letters of the EXPRESS store. The E starts on the ground and they go up vertically until the S hits the ceiling. Eamon loves these large letters. He touched the E and proudly announced, “E!” He touched the X and said, “X!” He stood on his tiptoes and brushed the P with his fingertip, and then he couldn’t reach the rest. He turned me. “Mommy! Lift up! Eamon touch letters!”
I assured him that I could get him to the R and maybe the next E, but the last two were beyond hope.
Eamon thought, and within seconds had a solution.
“Eamon fly up. Touch ceiling.”
I started to explain that this was rather unrealistic, but apparently it is only unrealistic if you are a sensible grown-up, because in the instant I blinked, he DID fly up and touch the ceiling. I know this only because the next thing I heard was, “OW! Eamon bump head on ceiling! Oh no. Darn it! Come back down. Walk on floor.”
He then took my hand, and off we went to lunch.
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