Out of The Mouths of Babes

This weekend was a particularly rich one for comical Little Bluisms. That little guy just has no end of bizarre or cute things to say. Some just make you shake your head in confusion and laugh. Like earlier today when he said, "Mommie, I talk to you." And then I did what a lot of parents seem to do in my situation, which is repeat what we think our toddler said by way of confirming whether we translated their babble correctly. "You want to talk to Mommie?" I smiled at him. With a perfectly straight face, he replied, "No." "Oh..." was all I could say in return, whilst Daddy Blue had a jolly good belly laugh over it.
Then there was dinner. We were having something homemade, what I would consider to be much better than fast food fare i.e. hamburgers and fries. I had made pork chops, delicately seasoned in a sweet/savory mixture of Chinese Five Spice and our favorite Santa Maria (garlic, salt, pepper, and parsley) blend. These were served up with some lemon peppered green beans and Stove Top stuffing. Blue and I thought it was delicious. Little Blue thought it needed several tablespoons of ketchup. There's just no accounting for taste!
But the crown jewel was our after-dinner, after-driving-around-to-see-if-Papa-Blue-was-stranded-on-the-side-of-the-road-and-discovering-he-was-safe-at-home-sleeping ice cream treat. Little Blue's chocolate custard is in one of our plastic cereal bowls. He eats it all by himself with a spoon. He's delighted. Until he finds a monster in it. We assure him there is no monster in the ice cream because monsters aren't real. He persists.
"No Mommie, monster! Monster real, Mommie! A real monster!" He points emphatically at the ice cream with his plastic spoon, which flings melted ice cream onto the table. I look closely in the bowl.
"There's no monster in there," I assure him. "I'll show you." I borrow his spoon and stir up all his ice cream, to remove any monster shapes from it's creamy structure.
"What doing?" he says with interest.
"I'm stirring your ice cream."
"Why?"
"To show you that there aren't any monsters in it."
"Why?"
"So you won't be afraid of it."
"Why?" Isn't anything obvious to this child??
"So you'll eat it," I reply with remarkable (for me) patience. I hand his spoon back to him. He half-heartedly pushes it through the ice cream to get a bite, and then drops the spoon in the bowl in alarm.
"There it is, there it is Mommie! Monster!" He pushes the bowl across the table toward me. "I don't wanna eat it Mommie, I don't wanna eatda monster."
I am completely baffled. "What monster??" He uses the spoon to point to it. It's none other than the bottom of his bowl, which curves upward and is showing through his ice cream in the very center of the bowl. Daddy Blue and I make what could have been a classic parenting mistake: we bust up laughing. Fortunately, Little Blue takes this abuse rather well, and is reassured when I tell him the monster is just the bottom of his bowl, so he finishes his ice cream like a champ.
Then we all troop upstairs to spend a few minutes in the bathroom while Little Blue sits buck naked on his very own potty chair for the first time. We read the potty book with the flushing toilet sound effects. Little Blue toots in the potty, which we consider to be a good start, and after waiting awhile to see if any actual pottying will occur, we pull up the real, cotton, big-boy underpants and put the little guy to bed, while visions of exciting potty milestones and messy potty accidents dance in our heads. It's a wonderful life. :)

Please allow me a girlish moment of romanticism...

It's easy to let the blog become a place of passive complaint. So let me break from that for a moment here, to express some good old fashioned sentimentality.

I still feel a swell of love every time I hear the song played that we danced to at our wedding. It's all I can do not to sing along whenever I hear the song I used to sing him on the phone before we were geographically together. I still have memorized how to play "our song" on the piano. Thinking about the two times he proposed to me brings a tear to my eyes. And I melt inside when he pays me one of his truly good compliments, like when he says I looked delicious in my Halloween outfit. He's still the best Sunday morning snuggler I know, even if now we have an extra body giggling between us and begging us to "Wake up! Wake up! I wan' go downstairs and play!" Whatever little quirks, whatever annoyances, or silly arguments, or dumb things we each get mad at, he's still the best partner I've ever had or imagined, in every way. We may have picked each other last, after trying other relationships first, but then again, life's little treasures are always in the last place you look, aren't they? ;)

So now you know that no matter how much I complain about anything, it's all just smoke and steam off the fire of a much deeper and more important emotion. 'Nuff said.