Two-year-old Phraseology

This past weekend, Charles, Zoe and I celebrated Thanksgiving with Charles' sister and her family in semi-rural North Carolina. It was great to get up into some hilly country (Charleston is very, very flat) and to spend time with a much-loved chunk of our family.

That said, any time you travel with a two-year-old, you can be fairly certain funny things will happen, and since Zoe is my child, most of the funnies occur when Zoe opens her mouth.

In the first place, on the evening of Thanksgiving as we all sat and (tried to) eat a peaceful dinner, Zoe was over-tired and rather wired. She decided that the appropriate thing to do would be to count the diners. So for the next twenty minutes, we each got jabbed in the head by a small but surprisingly pointy finger as she counted (always starting with herself)...One...Two...Fwee...Foa...Five...Six...Seven...And then our brother-in-law started messing with her.

"But I'm twelve."

"No, you're Six."

"No, I'm twelve."

"No! Six!"

This went on for quite some time, during which we all CONTINUED to get poked and prodded by a counting Zoe.

The next day, my sister-in-law somehow convinced me that shopping at Target on Black Friday would clearly be fun, so we took Zoe (who loves Target) along for the ride. Zoe knows that we're in the market (or maybe Santa is...) for a bicycle helmet as she has recently shown a big interest in Charles' old skateboard, so she helped me look for the "helmet aisle."

As we rounded the corner into the aforementioned aisle, Zoe literally gasped.

"Oh my God, there's the helmet aisle!!!"

Now, I am a Jersey girl who is somehow also part Valley girl in my speech patterns, and I have certainly been known to pepper all my conversations with the occasional (frequent) "Oh my God." I've never really given it too much thought, actually.

But that particular phrase, coming out of Zoe's mouth, makes my husband CRAZY, so I know I'm supposed to correct it. So, choking back laughter, I said, "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

She looked at me, a picture of innocence, and said, "I said, there's the helmet aisle!"

Finally, we took Zoe to her first ever college football game (UNC/Duke - Go 'Heels!!) on the amazing Duke University campus. The stadium is pretty tight quarters, and over the years, my outspoken sister-in-law has gotten to know her neighbors on one side, who happen to have two grown daughters.

One of the men absolutely ate Zoe up (have I mentioned how darn cute she is?), and at one point asked her what her name was.

Zoe answered, "I'm Zoe, and this is Aunt Mary, and that's Uncle Keith (Keef), and that's Morgan and Kayla and Mommy and Daddy."

Then she stopped, looked around her, and gestured to the crowd.

"But I don't know who all those people are."

So it was a great weekend, we laughed a lot, and I forgot to take even a single picture.

So it goes. We've still got the memories.

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And, coming soon to a blog near you...I need to do a lot of reading first, but I want to work through my thoughts on the launch of WikiLeaks...because I'm afraid that for the first time I might be close to sharing an opinion with Sarah Palin...so I need to work on that opinion to make sure it's right....wish me luck!