New "words"

Fiona, Nora, and I were sitting down to a somewhat early lunch after having worked up considerable hunger at another Home Depot Kids Workshop this morning. When Nora didn't want another bite of the food I was offering, she turned her face as usual, but also suggested, "Change." Fiona and I were both duly impressed.

I held the cottage cheese container in front of Nora for her to see. I have gotten a little lazy lately about foods, and if she has already had enough of a particular food group, I don't bother to even dole it out unless I think she's actually going to eat it. Then I asked her, "Nora, do you want any of this cottage cheese?" She held her hands out to the container, saying, "Hold." I gave the entire tub to her. Then Nora added, "Cold. Whoshee. Gaga."

Those last two "words" are courtesy of Fiona, who taught Nora to repeat the babble from Ian Falconer's Olivia series. In Olivia and the Missing Toy, the spunky pig protagonist asks her baby brother William whether he took her missing toy, and he replies with a disarming "whoshee gaga" of baby babble.

What Nora thinks this means we'll never truly know; but from the looks of things now, it means "Look! I didn't want this last bite, and you skipped my bib today, so I spit it back out. I'm. Messy."