the words we use

When the weather turns cold and the car windows frost up, the twins take great delight in using their fingers to write words on the windows. They almost always write “I love you”, and watch in amazement as it fades from view as the heater warms the windows. Today Tyler wrote “I love you Da” and was waiting patiently for me to return from scraping the frost off of Carina’s car when Tayler rolled down the window, ruining Tyler’s handiwork. I was approaching the car as Tayler was rolling the window up, and I saw a small grin or smirk on her face, and saw Tyler starting to pout. Tyler expressed her anger and disappointment about the event, so I asked Tayler why she did it. “I wanted to see out the window.” “Then why were you smiling? Because you were smiling I think you knew what you were doing, and you rolled the window down to wipe off Tyler’s words.” “Just because I was smiling doesn’t mean that I did it on purpose!” How do I counter that? True, it doesn’t mean she did it on purpose, but the body of experience I draw upon with them strongly suggests to me that she did do it on purpose. Why is parenting so hard?!

While Carina was convalescing yesterday, I took the kids to the Chinese restaurant for dinner (their favorite place). Tyler was telling me something in her staccato fashion, when I heard a surprising correction from her: “I fought… um… I fought… um… I thought that …” We’ve been encouraging Tyler to pronounce the th sound for many moons, and have been having only limited success. I was really astounded – and extremely proud – to hear Tyler self-correct this.

Oh how quickly they grow up!