Baby Translator

Okay okay, sorry I've been away for a while, lost in the abyss of daily life. Well I'm back, and today I'm going to mention a little something about baby translation. You see, Jessica is at that stage of life that every parent loves, that stage where she has words for about everything and very few of them are in the dictionary. For example, let's take "dwaffies". What are dwaffies, you ask? Well, it was time for the evening snack, and Jessica was frantically pointing at the fridge yelling, "Dwaffies! Dwaffies". At first I thought she wanted a waffle, but no, her word for waffle is "Farfel". Or is that her word for flower? I forget. Anyway, I then thought she wanted a cracker, but that would have been "quackel". Then it occurred to me. About five minutes before we have been discussing various fruits, and strawberries were mentioned. I said, "do you want Strawberries?" Her answer to that was an ecstatic, "Yes! Yes! Dwaffies!!" Followed by a heavy sigh that could only mean, "My god, these adults are so freaking STUPID."

Hilary has often told me that my ability to translate Jessica-speak is uncannily accurate, and far better than she can do. It's been more than one where Jessica would be running around yelling, "finglide, finglide!" Hilary would ask what it was she wants and, without skipping a beat I would tell her, "She wants to go outside on the swings and slide down the slide."

Some other important terms to know around our house:

Booma = banana
Boom = Balloon
Yellow = yellow
Yellow also = purple
Purple = Barney
See = Jessica (note that she picked that one up from "JeSSE")
Mike = Daddy. No, say "daddy."...."Mike"....."Fine, whatever".
Updown = down
Bof = Bath

By the way, at this moment in the other room I hear a baby screaming and a 4-year-old yelling, "I need that! I need that". Hilary then told her that she was being rude and not sharing, to which her response was, "But it's not rude to me!!"

Bliss. Nothing but bliss.

Love for sale

So, this weekend, we had a yard sale. For those of you on the east coast, that would be a tag sale. It was time to eliminate about 1800 cubic feet worth of crap from our house, in preparation for that next generation of Things That Stain, Things That Clutter, kiddie pools, and Disney Princess Fire Hazards. So after about three weeks of planning, attic emptying, closet purging and soul searching we were ready for the onslaught of (as my sister calls them) Freaks And Weirdos that are yard sale patrons. I figured we had it made, because at the bottom of the street the local church was having a "huge yard sale" on the same day, so through some strategic signage we would be able to grab those shoppers that just couldn't get enough of the chotckes at the church and needed another fix.

Well in the end, Natalie did far better financially than we did by selling lemonade. Who, honestly, could resist a little redheaded girl (Charlie Brown couldn't, that's for sure) following you around saying, "would you like some ice cold lemonade? It's only a quarter and I made it myself!" Well, it turns out Natalie made almost as much in tips as we did in the whole sale.

It seems that folks in the North Hills of Pittsburgh don't want our crap. They have enough of our own. In fact, I head a story on NPR (this is true) about the Do-It-Yourself Storage industry where someone cited a statistic that "Americans have consumed more stuff since 1960 then then entire world did in all of history before 1960." Okay, so how did they calculate that one? By the end of the day, perhaps 10% of our stuff was gone. And mind you, it was good crap too. I mean surely there must be someone who needs a completely unused floppy drive and a dozen highball glasses that say, "Greece Vacation" on them, no?

No.

And no, we've never been to Greece.