Words-Words-Words Nootchie

She purposefully is marching toward birthday number three, just about a fraction over halfway there in fact, and bursting with talk-talk-talk.

We skype a lot and engage in virtual hugs- it's not the real thing, but I'll take it.

Even screen time, frustrating though it can be, yields some truly rare gems.

One "video chat" day, after watching the whirling Nootchie jumping up and down and doing some truly "unusual" footwork, she holds up to the screen the miniscule, beloved figurine known simply as “baby pony”- a little totem that accompanied her to New York on her last visit. After I duly admire this offering, the Nootch disappears stage left and reappears  a moment  later holding up a pink “Runaway Bunny” t-shirt: Yoo bawd mee dis! She shouts triumphantly up at the computer.

It’s true!!! I bawd her dat! What memory! What recall! What perception the kid has!!! It happened during her last visit to the east coast several months back. We nabbed the t-shirt on a trip to a very neat children's book store, and she picked it out herself! Her intelligence clearly is amazing. What does it matter that this spontaneous epiphany about the origin of the “Runaway Bunny” t-shirt had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation we had just been having?She’s reminiscing, yes reminiscing about some of our fonder moments together in the good ol' days of a previous visit!

On another screen encounter, Nootchie is trying to figure out exactly what to say in answer to a question  about her daily life when suddenly she bursts out: I hadda bubba bat!  Oh, how marvelous! A bubba bat! With soap and all kinds of bubbas, and in the tub!!! Such a great conversationalist- it’s incredible, and still only in “the twos. . . .” I’m blown away, really. Plus of course she is describing something fun that she did, true proof of her unbelievable social facility and communicative expertise.

A week or so later I am making the usual one-sided, much too loud conversation and she is listening,  laughing and jumping up and down, when apropos of nothing she lifts up her shirt to expose what appears to be her belly, replete with belly button, and shouts: I hadda tattoooo!  Wow! Fanstastic!!! Transfers are alive and well, children are still entranced with them. Nootchie is a fearless explorer of new experiences, even if she didn't get to keep the little picture that for an instant or two lived on her tummy; she remembers with fondness that it once was there, however briefly.

When we finally get together in person and I can hug her for real, the pearls come cascading forth:

- yoo will stay a-wile?

-you sit heeere!

-I neeed sumting to eeeet.

-lie down! (command given during bedtime stories)

-I hadda boo boo. . . . . (uttered in an a most plaintive, almost heartbreaking little voice)

-I wantoo wear dis (said like a true fashionista).

And much, much more. Oh, so much more, I could write a novel.

C’mon, these are sentences folks, subjects, predicates, with modifiers and connectors occasionally thrown in, nominal and verbal slots, all in the right order! She even knows the term “yesterday,”  attesting to her beginning mastery of physics and the concept of time. . . . 

The weeks fly by, and a couple of months later the Nootch actually is able to call on the phone and blurt out proudly and emphatically, Happpy noo yee-ah.

Really, the kvelling is becoming almost too much to bear.

I say almost. . . .