"My Eyes Was Broken" and Other Insights

Over the last year Toby has traveled from the land of shrieking tantrum throwing and erratic hand gesturing to the peaceful bliss of real language. (Okay, shrieking tantrums are still a part of life, but at least now we can ask him why) Although his vocabulary is extensive enough to provide hours of what Aunt Savanah calls, "an explosion of train information," there is a gaping chasm keeping me from accessing the things I actually want to know. While he is sublimely compliant when talking about items that interest him, any sort of perceived interrogation from me on other matters will have him clamming up like a government spy. Not to mention that a recount gleaned from him in this way is more than likely, dare I say... inaccurate. Getting factual particulars from a three year old is like retrieving the grains of wheat from a fully cooked lasagna noodle. After a long chain of arduous chemical breakdown processes you must piece together the tiny bits of matter so chemically altered they are practically irrelevant.

Of all the communication vortexes, preschool is the cat's pajamas. Because I am not present, I have no system of checks and balances to fill in the missing plot elements. I might be told that "so-and-so went to time-out for playing in his poop" or "someone-or-other hit me in chapel" but be left hanging for the logical circumstances surrounding these allegations. Some days a take-home report appears in his folder to guide me, a daily inventory that tallies the number of poopoos and peepees and how much of the PB&J was left in the sandwich bag after lunch. The focus of study for the morning appears under the heading "Ask Your Child About..." followed by an activity or nursery rhyme that was of particular importance (which curiously ends up being the one thing for which he has no recollection). The teachers are wonderfully forthcoming if I feel the need to pry (an act that requires my lingering in the doorway of the classroom, bouncing a very heavy seven month old on my hip and making idle chatter until every last whining and groggy child is collected by a parent), but even they are often baffled. Due to his array of imaginary friends and ability to recall insignificant events (e.g. seeing a dead fish floating in an aquarium at Wal-Mart, the engine that pulled the North Pole Express was named "Puffy"), I must determine what is fact and what most likely occurred on an episode of Calliou two weeks ago.

A post preschool conversation might happen like this:

Me: So how was your day at school? (My eyes burrow right into his buzzed little head hoping to read his mind and forgo the formalities.)

Toby: "My eyes was open at skewel. They was bro-ten."

Me: "Really. Was that during rest time?"

Toby: "Yes. Miss Julie say 'Toby, be steel.' Sometimes I not need be steel. Sometimes I need be a lil' bit widdly at skewel."

By utilizing the decoder ring from the bottom of the Frosted Flakes box I can now simply substitute all "t's" for "g's" or "k's"...or leave them as "t's" if it makes more sense. It is really a brilliant demonstration of algebra being useful in an everyday situation. Maybe it could be added as a story problem on the SAT.

As his linguistic skills evolve, I must also keep up with the improper usage of new words. Upon hearing an event happened "today" I know he clearly means today or yesterday or last year or next Easter, all of which are virtually interchangeable distinctions. For nearly six months he began every single sentence with either "probably" (sounding like prolly) or "maybe". It was the kind of habit that I found irritating until one day he woke up from nap bluntly asking for chocolate milk and I sort of missed the cuteness of those silly adverbs.

Toby's language is a sort of mysteriously morphing blob that is slowly shaping itself into something recognizable. But whose complaining? My son, with two of the darkest, deepest wonders of the whole earth, which are his delicious little eyes, surrounded by eyelashes as long as a peacock's feathers, looks up at me to ask out of nowhere, "Member dat mommy? Member when we wode on Puffy last night?" I do remember, Toby, I do. And even though I know that it was months ago, I get what you're saying because you had so much fun and you just wanted to tell me about it again. I'm listening.