Having Christmas with a 3 1/2 year old means that the holiday takes on a new meaning. You can’t go to bed without leaving cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer. Tearing open gifts with wild abandon is the norm. Best of all, your mom lets you eat as many cookies as you want for one day (Julia consumed four large sugar cookies along with a whole cinnamon roll). What I liked best about spending time with the kiddos is that Julia has now reached an age where she says some of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Here are two favorites from the weekend:
* Julia: Aunt Tammy? Do you like this song? Me: Yes, I do. Do you? Julia: No, I’m not a fan. Me: What did you say? Julia: I’m not a fan.
* Julia: Where’s Santa? (We were at the Mall on Christmas Eve). Me: I think he’s gone to the North Pole to get ready for tonight. Julia: Well, where’s the pretend Santa? I looked at my sister in surprise wondering if she’d told Julia the Mall Santa was pretend. Ralph just shrugged and whispered, “I don’t know where she got that.”
It just amazes me her insight and intelligence. She’s so quick and funny. I’m sure some of you may think that’s just normal for a 3 1/2 year-old, but I’d like to think it’s because she’s brilliant!
Lydia, at almost 11 months, is a sweet, sweet girl. She’s cuddly and quiet unless she’s sick or hungry. Otherwise she finds joy in watching Julia dance around, playing with toys or having someone make faces at her. It’s going to be really fun watching her grow up.
Pretty Pretty Bang Bang 
I know, everyone thinks their own children are the smartest ever. Sylvia told her first grade teacher about the word fake (it was a vocab or spelling word): “It’s like when your Christmas tree isn’t real, it’s fake. But we don’t call it fake. We call it artificial.”
Little kids are awesome.
When I was a very little child, I was fascinated by language play (shocker) and made up my own vocabulary / was fascinated by other languages.
When I was three or four, my parents owned some kind of a sedan with a powered sunroof. Based on the electric screeching noise made when the sunroof retracted, I created a new onomatopoetic noun for any car with a sunroof: “soreecher,” which my parents found heartily entertaining. They can tell the story to this day. I think there were other Greg-specific vocabulary words, but I can’t remember them.
Then when I was five or six I learned how to sing O Come All Ye Faithful in Latin based on some songbook we had lying around the house. It wasn’t long before I realized some of the Christmas carols and liturgical singing in the Missal at church (Our Lady of the Lake in Branson) were printed in both English and Latin, so I would ignore Bible readings and the homily and study the Latin lyrics.
Later I read The Lord of the Rings (two versions of Elvish and other imaginary languages) and when I was a teenager, contemporary English writers like Iris Murdoch (dialect: In England you “lay” the table instead of “setting” it, “ring off” instead of “hang up” the phone and “go to hospital” instead of “go to THE hospital”) and then I finally became a double-major in French in college.
It all began with sunroofs. But I am not the smartest ever.
Good grief! All I did as a child was play with Barbies and draw fashion designs. I did read a lot, but mostly Laura Ingalls Wilder, Trixie Beldon and Edgar Allan Poe.
Gleeps!
Is that a Trixie reference I see?