Mommy's a Monkey

Zoe's vocabulary has been exploding wildly over the past three months. It seems every day she comes up with something new. Saturday night we actually ate a meal together as a family...all three of us. This doesn't happen often as Zoe tends to need her dinner at 5 pm on the dot, and Brian doesn't get home from work until almost 6 pm. Besides that, with a busy toddler we have found things often work better when the adults eat in shifts anyway. That way one of us can always be in charge of trying to keep up with the energizer bunny whilst the other gets a brief moment of peace for such needs as eating. So the stars were all aligned Saturday night. We were all coordinated with our appetites, it was Brian's day off, and I was well coordinated with my cooking efforts, and it just worked out that way.

Brian got to be in charge of shoveling into the baby whatever she couldn't shovel in for herself (she has a voracious appetite). At one point Brian referred to her as his "little monkey." To this she responded by trying to say "monkey." It came out sounding like "monka." I responded by stressing the prononciation of the the word, "MON-KEY" followed by my enthusiastic attempt to make monkey noises. Zoe found this extremely funny, and so I did what any good parent would do and repeated the monkey noises for as long as she found it funny (which was much too long for anyone in their right mind to be making monkey noises, by the way). Dinner was entertaining for all that night--but more so for some of us than others (Brian had eventually given me that look that says "you are only funny for so long before you cross the line into obnoxious--and you have officially crossed that line").

Ever since that night Zoe has been working on saying "monkey." This afternoon Zoe and I were coloring in her new coloring book and she found a picture of a monkey. She called it a turtle at first (she is into calling everything a turtle these days--I've learned not to work too hard at trying to understand the mind of a toddler). I corrected her by stating that it was a monkey. Her face then lit up and she broke into a huge grin and exclaimed "OH! Monka!" as her chubby little finger pointed right at me.

Yep, that's my girl--right on the ball, as always.