Zara’s Running Dialogue
And on the heels of boy quotes, I’m pretty sure Zara could fill an entire post all by herself. There are times David and I just shake our heads and grin at each other. She is so girl. For starters, there was the wailing episode in the bathtub when I asked her why she is crying. “I don’t knooooooow,” she sobbed.
Then there are the multiple times when her own jabbering isn’t sufficient and she says hopefully, “Can ‘ou talk wif me?”
I love this stage of talking with all the mutilated words, but especially because it is just the funniest thing to hear such grown up stuff come from such little people (or miniature human as Adam would put it).
It’s no secret that Zara has older brothers. She pretends to gallop on horses and shoots imaginary birds through the car windows. But it gets really funny when she mimics with no idea what she is saying. Recently she started asking (in a rather whiny voice to boot), “Can I have some fwee [free] time?” Um, isn’t that what two year olds do all day every day??
Other times she gets all glow-y and says, “I’n an idea!”
For awhile she would ask, “What time is it?” multiple times a day. And then when I answered she got indignant because in her mind it was always 4:30.
She gets pool and Pooh all mixed up and and so we often get asked, “Can me watch shwimming in du Pooh?”
That little shw is just the cutest, even if it makes her sound inebriated. “Oh, she sho shweeeeeeeeet,” she croons over Bella dozens of times a day.
She was so in love with Bella long before she was born and would often ask, “Baby, mommy’s hummy told? [Is the baby in Mommy’s tummy cold?]. No, the baby isn’t cold. “Baby Mommy’s hummy ‘ine?” Yes, the baby is fine. And then she’d be off to play.
She is Miss Independent in capital letters and italics. I know this is a rite of passage, but she’s certainly doing a good job of making sure we don’t miss the fact that it’s happening. “How we do it?” gets said with only slightly less regularity than “I can mySELF.”
And then she gets all melty and cuddly as soon as she and Bella are both in the same parent’s lap. “Do ‘ou ‘ave ‘ou two yittle dirls?
There are so many, many consonants that get replaced. She wears ship hops on her feet and says a bad word when she tries to say they fit. We split laughing when she watched a video of Liam taken when he was three and her response was, “Whoa. He can weally talk well.”
Not only is she independent, she’s pretty sure she can keep Adam and Liam in line singlehandedly. Sometimes the boys will throw ball with her. She stands at the top of the stairway and one of them will stand at the bottom. It doesn’t level the playing field but it definitely makes it less boring for them. Once when she went to retrieve the ball, Adam hid. She yelled and yelled his name and when he didn’t reappear she said, “Hey, Mommy, A’am not being ‘bedient!
It didn’t take her very long to figure out that Mom’s word is authority so one day when they were tussling on high in the basement and she was too afraid to join them she sat on the steps for a bit. Suddenly she declared, “Hey boys, my mom tell me ‘ou ‘ave to dop [stop]. I thought it was hysterical until the next day when she tried it on me. She wanted something and I said no. She looked at me and said quite certainly, “My mom tell me me TAN.”
She’s still trying to figure out where things come from and recently she will often say, “Dis nummy, nummy, nummy. Who made it?” when she likes the food. But when I reply she insists, “No, DOD [God] made it.”
Liam is flat out amazing with her. He keeps her entertained when I ask him, too, but more often than not he plays with her simply because he loves her. He teaches her all kinds of fun ways to play, or gets her to join him when he’s working. He just finished up his own thirty day challenge of running five times a day from our house to the neighbor’s house and back. Zara badly wanted to run, too, so one day he took her out running across the yard to the fence and back after he finished his own sprint. It became a need for her, suddenly. One morning she was sitting on top of the loveseat trying to convince Liam to take her to run to the fence. He wasn’t in the mood and said she could go on her own. “No, me tant doe on my own. Dat ‘ould be dary [scary],” she said sadly. Instantly Liam softened and he took her on a run. No wonder she adores him!
My favorite quote though, is only about Zara, not one she said. We were one the way home from the beach and she was being oh so very Zara. David just shook his head and said, “I pity her husband.” 🙂 🙂