bandersnootch

My goodness gracious. Ben is rapidly approaching 14 months on the planet, and already he can look down over the heads of some of our shorter neighbors. We’ve had to reinforce the crib against his massive gravity and take out a loan to cover his growing food bills. Ben is so talkative that even our cat has taken to wearing earplugs around the house to avoid the disturbance that is Ben’s vocabulary. This past Sunday, Ben ran the mile in 4 minutes 17 seconds - a record for his age bracket. All this, and yet his top is still as bald as his bottom.

So I exaggerate. . . a little.


His vocabulary is a thing of wonder though. While we took a stroll down the block a couple of days ago, he paused in front of the neighbors yard, pulled back on my hand and pointed at who-the-heck-knows-what about twenty feet away, all while babbling some crazy nonsense that must have sounded to him VERY important, but came across to me as merely “ah no. nah no.” As a parent trying very hard to stay involved with my almost-adolescent child’s social life, I listened intently and offered him some of my own nonsense, “Oh yeah? Nah-no? Cool, look at that. . .nah-no. Okay let’s go.”

But he refused. He kept pulling at my hand and pointing at the nah-no in the neighbor’s yard which, I admit, looked to me a lot more like dandelions or grass or dirt or air. Certainly we hadn’t discussed any names for these mundane things yet, as we have for things like book (gook), cracker (racker), and thank you (ah-do), so what nah-no was, I had no clue. Hence, we discussed these new items’ proper names then started again down the sidewalk. But he kept pulling at me and pointing back at the nah-no, so I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I picked his curious ass up and continued down the sidewalk. And because this is fun, Benjamin didn’t miss his nah-no one bit. That is, until we came back to the neighbor’s yard on our way back home and the nah-no reappeared.

I still haven’t figured out what nah-no is, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the same family as ah-doh and da-da, these being the words that he repeats for just about everything he sees that hasn’t been defined for him yet, or words that he just can’t pronounce. I wish I could come across something I didn’t know the word for and just repeat some other word for it instead. And if somebody tells me the correct word? Nah, that’s too difficult, I’ll just keep calling it my own thing.

What’s that you call it? Automobile? No, that’s a bandersnootch. Seriously, look it up.