Love and Marriage, 2-year-old style

Here's a conversation from this evening between Mark and Samantha, as they were contemplating a photo from our wedding:

Mantha: What's that?
Mark: This is a picture from when Mommy and I were married.
Mantha: Where was I?
Mark: This was before you were in Mommy's tummy.
Mantha: When I bigger, I get married too!
Mark: Who are you going to marry?
Mantha: Eric!
Mark: You're not supposed to marry your brother. You'll find someone else to marry.
Mantha: I marry my spoons, because I love them.

Horticulture

The teachers at Samantha's school recently planted a small garden of herbs, tomatoes and strawberries. Today, Mark was eating strawberries and Mantha said, "Baby ichigos grow in leaves." (Ichigo is the Japanese word for strawberry.) I had never though tof that way, but of course she's right!

(In other Mark-Samantha conversation, she recently interrupted his rendition of ABCs by admonishing him: "Drive Daddy. Two hands.")

Ohio

As we've been listening to NPR in the car lately, there's been a lot of talk about the upcoming primaries in Texas and Ohio. Generally speaking, Mantha isn't too keen on listening to the news -- she'd rather listen to her kid-music CDs. But she does get excited when NPR mentions Ohio. She practically jumps out of her car seat and repeats it very loudly.

It took me about a minute to realize that she thinks they're saying "Ohayo," which is Japanese for "good morning." It's a phrase she hears often on her beloved Shimajiro DVDs.

What's in a name?

Samantha is learning to say her full name, and the most difficult part is Shiroishi. She seems to have gotten the hang of it now, but for about a month she liked to pronounce it as "Shiro-oishi-neh."

"Oishi" is Japanese for "tastes good," and with the "neh" on the end it becomes a rhetorical question, like "This tastes good, doesn't it?"

Walk Away

At Cal-Tot (Samantha's school), kids are told to "walk away" when they're doing something wrong, like making a mess when they should be cleaning up, or trying to wrest a toy from another kid. I don't know how often Mantha is told to walk away (hopefully not often), but she has picked up on the meaning of this phrase and she uses it at home, mostly on Mark.

Lately Mark has been trying to teach her that if she insists on carrying her blankets around the house, it's much safer for her to ball it up first so she doesn't trip on it. When she puts one down, he often folds it up for this very reason. She doesn't like this one bit. One morning, after Mark had left for work, she found a blanket folded up on the sofa. She looked at it and said, "No, no, Daddy. Walk away Daddy," even though he was nowhere in sight.

Punctuation

In the last few days, Samantha has become interested in punctuation. I think this is an outgrowth of her interest in shapes. When we read books together, she points at the periods and says "circle" for each one. Today she started doing that with the dots on top of lower case i's and j's too. Exclamation points are "spoons," which took me a few minutes to figure out. I'd never thought of it before, but they do look a little like spoons!

Sweet Tooth

Samantha has finally discovered .... dessert! One of her classmates turned 2 last week, and he brought in homemade cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Mantha was the first one to finish her cupcake and climbed onto the table to grab a second one, according to her teachers. When she was done with that one, she apparently tried to talk another kid out of his cupcake. I'm not sure how successful that was, but there was plenty of chocolate frosting on her outfit when I picked her up from school! After rejecting her birthday cake and, more recently, chocolate chip cookies, I am relieved that she might be my daughter after all.