Extolling the Virtues of a Poriferan Encephalon*

Remember when I wrote about how Ella and I weren’t speaking the same language anymore, well it was a phase. Recently she has developed the superior ability to pronounce words like “Madagascar” and string together sentences like “Mother, I need to watch Madagascar again because it makes me amazingly happy.” No joke on that one. People have stopped me in the grocery store to tell me they never expected such a small child to enunciate such big words. Well, actually they say things like “Wow, she can talk good!” or “Was that you or her talking?” to which I usually respond “She’s the only one I have to talk to all day” and they laugh and nod, but I’m not really kidding.

We used to go to the Discovery Center on Thursdays or occasionally we’d run errands on a Tuesday and lunch with Dan at McDonald’s but since gassing up the van too often may require us to eat tuna and ramen noodles for the week, we have relinquished our little field-trips for closer expeditions; places like the amazing back yard, or the incredible front yard and sometimes we even walk to the park up the street. This proximity revolution has replaced my latte & Dan with ice cream & Ella and so I taught her to converse. It turns out that toddlers like learning new words and using them. Who’d have thought?

It entertains me to no end to hear Ella spring new words on Dan. Often in the evening Dan says “Do you know your daughter just told me that potato chips aren’t healthy for my metabolism?” or “Ella says Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Did you teach her that?” and I respond “No, she must’ve read it somewhere.”

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PS Thank you to the Irreverent Antisocial Intellectual for the inspiration for this post.

*ode to spongy brain