Deja poo

From a sociological perspective, the short world is fascinating. You wouldn't suspect it from stock phrases like 'googalibababa', but short people are verbal hawks who are always watching for prey.

My research indicates that a favourite pass-time of short people is the old a 'accidental' profanity game. The scoring goes like this: one point for a flustered mum, two points for an embarrassed babysitter, and ten points for a tut-tutting room of smug observers (whose children will NEVER speak like that).

A prime example is the time (or one of the times) I stubbed my toe, shouted a word that rhymes with  'git', leading Ana to go off like a car alarm 'GIT! GIT! GIT!' thereby making her day.

Ana went through a very active patch of Pediatric Outburst Syndrome. She used to discuss male chickens in the context of clocks, and git in conjunction with torso-cover. She also liked to point out 'HUGE POOS!' usually when there weren't any around. The phrase, as you might expect of such a household as this, was introduced by her mama, spoken in a moment of anger at the neighbourhood's poo-hose cat.

Speaking of huge poos, in my younger and more impressionable days, I was once naive enough to let a naked baby run around the sitting room for several minutes. You see, midwives and health visitors have this joke they like to play on new mothers: they say in very earnest tones, that the best way to avoid nappy rash is to let a baby run around in her birthday suit for brief spells each day. In an infamous incident that has come to be known in this house as 'Poop Slide Gate', I discovered the punchline to this joke.

I left my smiling angel on the carpet of the sitting room and walked to the kitchen for two minutes. When I returned, I smelled the punchline. Then I spotted a big pile of punchline on the carpet. There were cute little baby footprints leading in a trail, like Gretal and her breadcrumbs, all around the living room, up the stairs of our plastic slide (on loan from the toy library), then a swerving streak of punchline all the way down. The baby at the bottom of the slide was covered in punchline, and deep in concentration, body-painting. Needless to say, I am more wary of visiting health advice these days.

Pants. 

Relative peace, in poo terms, returned to this house after Ana potty trained. But Ali is turning into a chatterbox, and has noticed that everyone in this house visits the toilet except for her.* She is very leery of being left out, so she likes to toddle along on toilet visits and, in the manner of a beagle shouting at the moon, unleash an ode to 'pooooooooooooooooo'. And she is starting to take an interest in mispronounced clocks too. Ali, like her sister before her, is getting to be a skilled practitioner of the accidental profanity game.

This post was written for the year's most illustrious event, the Carnival of Poo, hosted by the talented Ella of Notes from Home fame.

*Actually that's a lie: Ali frequently visits the toilet. I know when she has done so, because she kindly leaves evidence of her visit floating duck-like in the toilet bowl: toys, shoes, and hairbrushes, entire civilisations.

There is no Ali, there is only Zuul

Ali, the baby formerly known as Darth, has dropped her signature deep breathing habit and the contemplative 'ko'. Now when considering the dark side of the baby force she screams like a Nazgul closing in on a juicy ring-bearing Baggins for breakfast. These outbursts are at at such an ear-splintering frequency that everyone in the vicinity experiences a sudden compulsion to hand over valuables and jump into moving traffic to make it stop.

Rebel yell.

Apparently this is called 'crowing', although to my ears it is more eagle-on-steroids than piffling chicken. The rare Genghis Khan victory shriek never used to bother me, but Genghis has now taken over and installed new sound amplification equipment. And it is a driving hazard. When Ali deploys sound-weaponry from the back-seat as I pull into a huge convoluted roundabout with seven exits (a 'WTF roundabout' in American parlance), my brain-radars are instantly jammed, and I fear not only for our safety, but for the entire local area.

Sometimes I can cut a screaming session short by handing her a hairbrush, which inexplicably causes her to drop the vocals and play quietly for several minutes. But the threat of hair-brushing, funnily enough, is the one thing that makes her big sister Ana react like a Sam Raimi deadite, so I have to be careful.

Sometimes I wonder, rather wishfully, if I will be deaf by next Tuesday. Bearing two children has left me with super-acute hearing. Walls are no longer sound barriers; I can hear my kids breathing through floorboards and crying across town. I would be able to hear them over oceans and across continents too, had I not sworn off travel for the foreseeable future. Earplugs are now placebo and I don't have the time to attend metal concerts, but there is a flicker of hope growing in my mind that Ali's Nazguling might just be the cure for my over-active ears.

Hearing aside, I'm not sure how long my nerves can survive this. Ana crowed for a short time and then stopped. Screaming, like Darth-breathing, will surely migrate into the ever-expanding cupboard of things that have passed. Till then, I remain in aggressive negotiations with Genghis and Gozer for the return of my sweet little baby.

From the potty mouths of babes

'MORONS! There are some MORONS!'

This courtesy of Ana, high decibel, on our walk to the park this morning. The MORONS, or motorists, didn't appear to be doing anything particularly stupid. Next passing car, also MORONS.

MORONS, MORONS, MORONS. By the time we reached the park, an entire village of MORONS had been identified and shamed.

Ana has chronic pediatric outburst syndrome, a relatively common childhood condition. I first noticed it when she was about 18 months and could not yet pronounce the letter L. This didn't stop her from loudly identifying every clock she spotted. Fortunately we live in England, this just came accross as an interest in chickens.

*&£"*^$£-+^%*!!!

Around the same time she had difficulty with the letter R, but nevertheless became fascinated with shirts. She developed a compulsion to point at every one she saw, in a manner reminiscent of Dr Strangelove. This became a bit of a problem because we live in a village where about half the residents are sweet grannies, perpetually down the shop. Here's a typical sampling of dialogue from that time:

Bog Standard Gran: 'Hello poppet, how old?

Mama: 'Thank you Bog Standard Gran, 18 months.

Ana activates Strangelovian pointer finger salute.

BS Gran: 'Coocheecoo--"

Ana commences shirt recognition sequence...

BS Gran: '--cheecoochee--'

Ana launches: 'Sh*t! Sh*t! Sh*t!

Gran runs for cover, digestive biscuits go flying.

Ana: 'Sh*t! Sh*t! Sh*t!'

Pronunciation misunderstandings form the backbone of Ana's POS, but poor-taste word fixation brings up the rear. My neighbor's cat, Nemesis (I have no idea what his real name is), is essentially a poo-hose on legs. One afternoon I caught Nemesis red-bottomed in the middle of my front yard, where my kids play. I yelled at him to take his huge poo elsewhere. From behind me came: 'HUGE POO! 'HUUUUUUUUUGE POOOOOOO!' I should have seen it coming really.

HUGE POO was everywhere for weeks. The animals at the zoo were all taking huge poos (they weren't). Other kids were huge pooers. Trees pooed, cars pooed. Even BS Gran was implicated.

Ana's POS had been in remission for some time before rearing it's ugly mouth again today. It took me half the morning to figure out that it was my inane chatter about cars that had kicked it off: 'There's one car...there's another one...there are some more'. Ana fused these together into kid-speak: 'There are some more ones', or to my ears: 'MORONS!!!'.

I pity BS Gran. She won't deserve this. But the next time we see Nemesis, Ana will be ready.