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Sunday, September 15, 2019

Alexander tales

At 23 months, Alexander is quite the parrot. He will say anything anyone says...unless you specifically ask him to repeat something, in which case he absolutely will not. Often he will demand a turn saying a prayer or reading a verse of scripture, but it never goes over well.

"My turn! My turn! My turn!" he screeched during family scripture study this evening.

So naturally we relented and gave him a turn.

"Okay. Say: 'I came...'" I prompted.

Alexander pressed his lips tightly together and smiled silently at us all.

"...unto my own..."

Continued silence from Alexander.

"...and my own..."

Not a word.

"...received me not..."

Absolutely nothing.

It's hilarious because he looks so proud of himself for taking a turn but...he's not actually taking a turn. He does the exact same thing when he gets a turn saying the prayer—won't say a word. That doesn't stop him from butting in when it's not his turn, however. He does that plenty.

*****


He's getting to be a pretty good talker and has a surprisingly large vocabulary. Sometimes I'll ask him if there are any words that he doesn't know because he's always pulling new words out that I had no idea he knew.

Today he got out a collapsible stool (so that he could climb on it to get a better view of dinner preparation) and it pinched his hand.

"Ouch! Help. Me. Mommy!" he said in that telegram way toddlers speak, with full stops between each word. "My. Finger. Hurt."

I quickly got his finger unpinched from the hinge and sent him on his way, just fine (and proud of all his talking).

*****

Yesterday he and Zoë were having an argument over some silly toy. To be fair, he had it first and she stole it from him and he wasn't going to back down without sticking up for himself first. So there was some snatching and yelling and shoving and then...ear-splitting screaming.

Alexander had bit Zoë right on her tummy and immediately felt terrible about it.

"Oh, no! Boey!" he cried, looking perplexed. Then he bravely extended his index finger and put it up to her wide-open yowling mouth. "Bite me, Boey!" he cried.

It was a noble effort to fix the situation.

"Oh, I don't want to bite you!" Zoë said (and then she pushed him over because...why not?).

So then he was howling because she'd pushed him (I wonder how he'd planned to react if she had taken him up on her offer to bite him) and she was still sniffling over the teeth marks in her tummy, but they soon were hugging and apologizing and couldn't even remember what it was they had been fighting over in the first place.

Silly kids.

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