Sure, she’s been spouting out a word or two here and there…“Mama”, “Dada”, “Bye-bye”, “Boo!”…little things like that. And she’s got the parroting thing down pat. Tell her to say something, and she’ll generally say it, for a minute anyway. But no sentences or anything like that…until today.
I was driving her back from the babysitter, as I do every weekday, and as usual I had the radio going and was serenading my little bundle of joy. Standard car radio rules apply:
Rule #1: Volume of music and singing increases proportionate to amount of ass a particular song kicks.
Rule #2: Actual singing ability is not a consideration.
Rule# 3: Singing volume must be kept to a minimum if anyone is in the car with you.
Rule #3b: Small children do not count towards Rule #3.
So when some Dramarama comes on the radio, Rule #1 goes into full effect. The steering wheel goes into full “drum kit” mode, the amps rise up from the floor, the mic drops down from the ceiling, and the crowd roars.
"I’ll give you candy, give you diamonds, give you pills, I’ll give you anything you want, hundred dollar bills!"
And a little voice chimes in from the back seat: “Stop it daddy daddy daddy stop it stop it daddy stop it!”
Read the doe? Is that like **Hal **reading the secret desires of sheep? Is the Briston Curse going to be bestiality?
…well, if the Littlest Briston is female, and a doe is female, then it’s lesbian-bestiality!
Hal Briston, first off, how could she be anything less than opinionated, she is, after all, you daughter.
I do feel your pain, however. I’ve always considered myself an undiscovered Streisand. Once I was rocking a sick, little, two year old girl, singing a sweet lullaby. It was late at night, very quiet in the ICU. My dulcet voice was the only sound, when suddenly the devil child shouts, “Don’t SING!” while gently patting my mouth.
The worse part was, SHE got applause from the other nurses. :rolleyes:
I’ll never forget Whiterabbit’s third birthday party, when in front of about 20 people, all our neighbors, grandparents, etc., as we all starting singing Happy Birthday, the moment I opened my mouth she burst into tears and started sobbing, “No sing, Mommy! No sing!”
I used to sing little nonsense songs to my angel while she was riding in the shopping cart at the store. Until the day, when she was about two and a half, that she looked up at me and said, “Shh, Mommy! Don’t sing!” I could tell she was simply mortified by my silly behavior in public.
Hal, you will find you’ll need to pay closer attention to lyrics for the next sixteen years or so. In fact, there’s still one Liz Phair song my seventeen-year-old (the older version of the moppet just mentioned) will never, ever hear in my presence. And sometimes I reach for the “skip” button even when I’m alone, just out of habit.
(I really, really missed the Butthole Surfers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers until my kids got old enough that I could reasonably infer that they’d regularly heard the words in question at school.)
My mother got hit from both of her very first grandchildren. She was rocking and singing to my sister’s boy when he put his little hand up and covered her mouth. And somewhere in that same time period, my brother’s daughter looked up from Grandma’s arms and said, “No sing, Grandma, no sing.”
