Ussins

Here are four recordings of Nem-nem, talking with us in her way, and laughing. If you listen only to one listen to the last - it is a scream in every sense.

Nem-nem and mommy, Oct 2007 (1:19, 792K, download mp3)

Nem-nem and Mago, Nov 2007 (1:53, 1.1MB, download mp3)

Nem-nem and daddy, Nov 2007 (1:38, 1MB, download mp3)

Nem-nem and mommy, Nov 2007 (3:17, 1.9MB, download mp3)

One day I thought I’d see what would happen if I brought her to hover over Mago, then pulled her away at a distance, than abruptly brought her close to hover again, etc. - while she is looking at him - a sort of form of “boo!” I guess. What happened was that she started emitting these greeting screams and squeals at him, to his entertainment, and this is going on in the second recording. She does it for other people too sometimes.

Recordings Copyright 2007 Richard Alexander Hall or Alex Hall, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States (see). Attribute the recording to me in any public use.

Judgment Day. I am before the pleading bar of the Almighty to state my cause for entering the Kingdom. Jesus asks the countless throng of God’s children:

“Is there anyone who has ought against this man, or reason he should not enter my Kingdom?”

A man comes forward, youthful, bright, with a sparkle in his eye, holding a cane for what reason I don’t know for all his vigor, covered with so many stamped coin souvenirs from his travels. Approaching, he looks at me, barks “Get something to eat!” and winks. He steps back down with nothing more to say. Neither does my Savior have any more to say.

They set me down for the feast of entrance. There in the abundance are the grapes, even the grapes of the winepress of the wrath of Almighty God, restored to the vine, never to be trampled again.

And I eat.

I’ve discovered yet another way to tickle Mago and/or make him laugh - at bed time I get close to his face and whisper in a low, I suppose strangely officious voice:

“Is it time for shleepy-shleepy-shleep?”

- And slowly try to nuzzle against his ear to whisper this over and over; I think the “sh” and “p” and breath tickle his ear. He becomes very amused, dodging his head back and forth, pushing my head back while I slowly try to advance on his ear, still repeating this. I’ll finally succeed at getting at his ear, he’ll laugh uncontrollably and finally push my head away as I give up, to which he then says:

“Do it again!”

I had forgotten this game after discovering it several days ago and at a recent bed time he requested:

“Say: shleepy-shleepy-shleep.”

He plays a game usually in the morning with Tia which he has dubbed (we don’t know why) “Bed-bed-bed”. Tia tells me now he would play it all day if he could. If she would let him.

The game is to have Tia (or me) sit in a chair with your legs straddled over air and the edge of his bed, with a gap between your legs which you hang a blanket on to make a sort of hammock; holding various stuffed animals in your lap which he requests you to make them talk. Mago crawls onto the hammock and “melts” so that he falls down between your legs with the blanket wrapping around him; he then has you put the blanket back over your legs and continue all of this over and over.

I don’t know how I haven’t written that - he’s been playing that game for many months.

Sometimes in the car (when Tia is driving) I reach my hands back from the front passenger seat to the rear and make them talk and sniff at Mago (another way to tickle), and bark and play like dogs (it entertains him very much).

Playing in his room this morning before dawn I asked him if I could play fort on his bed, putting blankets over us, which he rejected - he wants to play “Bed-bed-bed.” I said “Pleeease?” and put a blanket back over him. While he lay there I put my hands under the blanket to tickle his belly. He giggled in anticipation.

Wha.. how did the doggies get under here?

Here are some things from the past while, that I’ve been writing down.

Tia: (to Nem-Nem, while they play peek-a-boo) You’re going to be Superwoman in just three years. You’ll be flying around doing mathematics.

Tia made a red cape and eye mask costume for Mago (just for play, she says, not Halloween). He stood on our bed one morning to show it off.

Mago: I’m a bad guy! .. wait, I have to put down my sipee cup.

..

(Attempting over and over to place a star shape in a wooden puzzle, *sighs*) Too work.

..

(At random during the day) This is my treasure-hunting thumb.

Tia says he made that last up partly from a Blue’s Clues episode.

He calls very thickly frosted [me: disgusting!] cookies “Cookies on each tuver” (Cookies on each other) because it looks to him like two stacked cookies.

Tia has introduced me to Love and Logic (this sentence may be taken out of context), an audio program delineating so much wisdom on child rearing. Incidentally, what I have tried of it is positive and works and I’ll be listening to the whole thing. She checks these out from the Parent Education Resource Center at the Orem Library. The cover of the set for early childhood has a cartoon of an exhausted, bedraggled woman with two infants in tow. The library case for it opened and spilled the CD case out one day, and Mago looked at it.

Mago: Mama, is that ‘care for me’?,

A few days ago:

Mago: Daddy?
Me: Yes.
Mago: Feed to me.
Me: Feed to you? Do you mean read to you?
Mago: Read to me. .. (smiles) Feed and read!

Nem-nem beams at us and at people all the time. When she first sees me in the morning or coming home from work and I smile at her broadly (as I can only help myself to do with a baby who is my daughter), she beams and coyly tucks her head down and her arms up to her chest. Things she says:

Ppphhhhbt! Pppbbbbhht! Heh-pubbbbbppt!

Gggh!

Hoo!

(Laughing) Heh.

Hii.

Eeh!

Eeeyoo!

Nem-nem is also frequently rolling from her back to her side and tummy, less often from her tummy to her back, and sometimes does a swimming motion on her tummy, trying to start to crawl.

I took Mago for a hike up to the mouth of a canyon with surrounding high, spectacular, otherworldly surreal cliff walls early yesterday morning. On the way back down the canyon mouth as he heard some echoes in the canyon I realized I could show him how to echo his voice through the canyon walls - so I bellowed some two-tones and shouted “Echo!” etc., all of which we could hear bouncing back this way and up the other way, back and forth along canyon walls, quite loudly and clearly (especially lower pitches). I explained how the mountain bounces the sound back, and I think I may have said something to the effect that the mountain “says” the same thing back - an idea Mago picked up on and elaborated on, as it implies the mountain has a voice, and things that give you a voice.. He tried making an echo himself, and got it to work sometimes, after which he’d exclaim:

“I made the Daddy Mountain talk!”

He spoke of trying to get the Mommy Mountain to talk, too - which I explained we couldn’t make happen without Mommy here.

I realized we’d taken a long detour that had to be longer, as I had left the stroller at one fork of the path and accidentally came down another - and had to lead Mago through so many brambles and trees to get back to it - through which he made exaggerated imitations of my huffing and puffing. Getting the stroller again and traveling back down further, Mago tried to make an echo with the canyon walls increasingly out of range for it, and my explanations that they were too far away didn’t deter him. That same day in the evening I took him outside to look at the magnificent cliff wall facade (in magnificent yellow and blue-gray light/dark contrasts from light coming across the other end of the valley), he bellowed at it - mistaking echoes off nearby houses for the mountain’s speaking back - and wouldn’t be deterred that this was no mountain echo - again exclaiming he’d made the Daddy Mountain talk.

I took him for a walk late two nights ago (no, not anywhere near as late as I’m writing this entry). We’re up on a bench, or in the foothills under mountains. Obscured by houses in front of us but down in the valley to the far south there were four strobe lights swirling about in tandem, spreading their beams of light high up and across the sky in a swoop far outward, then around again and joining in to one brighter beam for an instant, then spreading again, and so on. Mago liked these, and I thought I’d explain them to him.

Me: “Way back behind those houses and down in the valley, there are four robot arms shining those lights. The arms swoop around like this” (swooping my arm) “.. and it makes the lights shine around the sky. They spread out and then come back together. They’re saying ‘come here, we have something to sell’ - or that’s what the people who are shining the lights would say if we went there.”

This seemed to satisfy his curiosity about them, and he blathered about other things and I joined him until suddenly he was talking about “powers”, and I wasn’t quite following him. I said “What?” and he pointed to the strobe lights in the sky over on our left -

Mago: “You can see their powers. Those are the robot powers.”

I was beside myself when he said this - I don’t think he’s never seen Strong Bad*, I don’t know where he picked up the idea of power as light, but it works alright - however, he wouldn’t be dissuaded that these were simply lights in the sky - in between laughing I tried several times to clarify to him that they are just lights - but he corrected me, no, those are robot powers, and you can see the robot powers.

Some while later I gave him the noun for it - strobe lights [whoops!  That should be search lights]. That seemed to change his mind on the matter (not that I would necessarily want his mind changed!) - he began using that term. Apparently you’ve got to give him the most solid noun possible - “light” is still too abstract; “robot powers” is, uh, more accessible.

*..and if so, are you some kind of robot? And if so, what kind of powers do you have? Do you use them for good, or for awesome?

..

Her name is Yoshimi
she’s a black belt in karate
working for the city
she has to discipline her body

..

‘Cause she knows that
it’d be tragic
if those evil robots win
I know she can beat them..

This morning, sitting on the front porch after he asked if the sun was hiding behind the mountain and I answered him no and showed him where it was hiding behind a tree, he asked:

Mago: “Daddy?”
Me: “Yes.”
Mago: “Are we in the sun’s garden?”
Me: (I don’t know where he got this, or maybe he made it up, but I think it’s a great idea, so I expanded on it) “Yes, the whole world is the sun’s garden. You’re in the sun’s garden, and I am, and mommy is, and sister is, and our neighbors are, and our family is.”

(It’s the Son’s garden, too).

At a cousin’s house Mago was playing with a wooden toy snake - the fairly large kind with a lot of interconnecting spine pieces or hinges, which make it slither back and forth when you bend it up or down - and Nem-nem was on her back on the floor, wiggling and cooing. None of us watched exactly what Mago did, but he was near Nem-nem when she gave out a howl and cry of alarm, so Tia went over and comforted her. As we speculated what might have happened, referring to Mago as we spoke, he approached a couch where several talking about this were sitting, and removing the wooden snake’s head where he had put it in his mouth, exclaimed:

“But I like a snake in my mouth!”

(So why doesn’t she? It’s a perfectly fun thing to do - what’s wrong with it?)

After we had taken him to the Chuck-E-Cheeze kid’s restaurant one evening (replete with a singing animal robot band on stage), the next morning I asked Mago how his time at Chuck-E-Cheeze was, and what he did. In his answers, he talked about the “butcher” on the stage - holding up his hands in the way a drummer would, working the drums.. er.. knives.

(Tia later clarified to me that he has a baker toy he often mistakes for a butcher - and I learned his birthday cousin does the same thing sometimes - so he probably thought the robot that was baking a pizza was a “butcher”. If so, I still think my mistake of his mistake is a very funny image)