Tales from the Crib

Mama the Monkey

Nolan’s first semblance of a word was “nana.”
Next came “dada” and finally I heard the sweet word – “mama.” For the next few weeks, everything was mama but that soon changed. He just stopped saying it.

I thought by now he’d know to call me mamma, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick. Now I’m “yaya.”
I was OK with that, until we had a playtime this week.

We have a monkey puppet that we’ve started using to interact with Nolan, and he loves it.

The “game” we made up starts with me taking a plastic cookie from his kitchen set, and having the money “eat” it. While he’s eating, he spits it out. Nolan howls with laughter when this happens.

I then wave a finger and tell the monkey that’s “not nice,” which is then copied by my little monkey of a son. He too waves a finger and says “na, na” to the monkey – his version of not nice.

Next, since the monkey was being “not nice,” I decided to put him into a time-out. Nolan thought this was even better.
Now he grabs the monkey from my hand and wants to put it into time-out himself.

That’s just great. While other little kids are having tea parties with their stuffed animals, my son’s learning about corporal punishment.

Anyway, back to my point.
I was talking to him about the monkey soon after, when he uttered the word “mama.” He was, of course, referring to the monkey, not me.

Even if his mom is a bit of a monkey now and then, I can’t help but chuckle that he’s given the title of mama to a stuffed animal.

Mom's cooking

Just when I thought all I’d have to blog about the Christmas holidays was how Nolan got into the spirit of unwrapping gifts, he pulled a stunt just before I came back to work.

It was Sunday morning, and the little rascal decided to repeat a bit of an embarrassing procedure.

First, he dragged a kitchen chair into the hallway.

I thought it was to play with the light switch, which he has done in the past. But this time, he climbed onto the chair, stood up and started waving his hands towards the hall. I flicked the lights on and off, but he didn’t want anything to do with that.

I must’ve looked confused because he proceeded to get down from the chair and walk towards the stove. He grabbed a dishtowel off the handle, then walked back and got up on the chair again.

Towel in hand, he started waving it towards the hall.

It was then that I got his point.

Nolan was standing under our smoke detector.

Once, maybe twice during the holidays, our smoke detector went off because some crumbs were burning in the bottom of the oven. To clear the air, my husband took a dishtowel and waved it under the detector.

I guess Nolan was paying close attention to this and decided he wanted to copy the motion in a game.

It was just strange to me that he did it so out of the blue.

That night and again the next we had guests over, and Nolan just had to show them his new trick, as mom hid behind her hands.

My cooking has improved a bit, but the old joke is that you know my dinner is done when the smoke detector starts going off.