"Oh no!"

Last week was relatively uneventful.  After the excitement of Max's seizure, Daniel decided he didn't want to be the only Salvateenie who hadn't been to the Emergency Room, so he set himself to a teething-induced screaming fit that the advice nurse felt was worthy of a visit.  He and Max both went and tag teamed in the screaming department.  But Daniel shut right up when the pretty doctor came in and there was flirting to be done, so we weren't too worried about him.  After a day or two more of crazy screaming jags they both seem to be doing just fine.

Then, there's Caroline.

Caroline has started talking.  Well, they all talk all the time, but Caroline has just begun to speak English, while the others still primarily communicate in Salvateenese.  (You cannot imagine how pleased I am to have come up with 'Salvateenese'.)  On Friday, while watching Intentional Talk on the MLB Network with Daddy, she quoted Kevin Millar saying "Got Heeeem!" and from there on it was off to the races. 

"Got Heeeem" - not Caroline

She is, in fact, so excited about talking that she'd rather do it than almost anything else, including sleep.

Way back when the babies were just barely rolling over, Caroline set her mind to sitting up and she would work herself into a frenzy trying to crunch her little abs and sit up, sometimes even waking herself up.  This seems to be the case with talking.  On Saturday night, after just over two hours of pleasant baby slumber, Caroline started screeching at the top of her lungs.  Normally, we let the babies "cry it out", but it had been months since she'd had any problems sleeping and she was sobbing and gulping for air, so I went in and rescued her.

As soon as we got into the kitchen, she perked up.  Once we were in the living room, she was all smiles, running to her toys and pointing to the TV, chanting "Die-oo!".  A quick glance at my English-to-Salvateenese dictionary showed this meant she wanted to watch the insipid pre-school cartoon "Caillou".  We found an episode and she sang along and played for a bit.  When I tried to turn the tv off to calm her down, she started again, "Mommy! Die-oo!"  I gave in and over the next three and a half hours we watched nearly every episode of Caillou on Demand (and I do mean that both as the cable service's "On Demand" service and Caroline's demands of more).  Finally, I found a different cartoon that bored her to the point that she slept.

Sunday night she slept fine until 12:30, at which point she woke up screeching again and howled bloody murder for the next half hour until she apparently decided we weren't coming to get her and she should just go back to sleep.

Monday was bath day and I cracked out the new bath crayons - a first for everyone.  For Valentine's Day, they tried coloring on a card for Grandma and Grandpa, but it became clear they need a little more practice holding the crayons, so bath time seems like a good opportunity to practice.  They have just recently started enjoying their bath books (soft, puffy plastic books they can read in the tub - when I introduced them they all gravitated to the Elmo books and shunned the ones with unfamiliar characters, so we know they're "reading"), so they jumped right in drawing on the pages. 

Caroline grabbed for the red crayon and swiped at the side of the tub with it, leaving a bright, red line.  She saw it and gasped, turning her little lips into a perfect "O", looked at me, and said, "Oh no!" in a little sing song way.  She repeated it at least fifty times over the next twenty minutes - "ohno, ohno, oh NO!" At one point, Daniel reached over to take a book away from her and she varied her tune, telling him, "NO NO NO!"  I was pleased to see he paid her the same attention he pays his parents when we say no - he laughed uproariously.

We see the doctor for the 18-month visit in a month.  I'm really hoping that by then I will have a better answer to the "What words can your child say?" question than, "Hmmm...'mommy' 'daddy' 'oh no' caillou' 'thank you' and 'got heem'".