My fourteen-month-old niece was over visiting the other day, because her mother was at some scrapbookorgasmo event, and her father needed to go shoot some live animals. Okay, that’s a lie. The part about the live animals. I’m not sure what he was doing, but it probably involved Home Depot. Or power tools.

Back to LittleNiece. She is at the age where she thinks she can communicate with adults, but most have no idea what she is saying. For example, when I caught her in the kitchen with the nightlight that should have been in the hallway, and was instead in her sweaty little palm, she immediately conveyed to me there was a serious problem in our household.

”LittleNiece, what are you doing with that?”

“This? This jumped INTO my hands as I was walking down that dark hallway. I mean it. Right off the wall, and into my hands. I don’t know how you people live here, with objects like this nightlight refusing to stay in the electrical socket where it belongs!”

Of course, it sounded like, “Bldkbkdnsgk forldkfjdkk, andksjjkkkddd, n pidklskfjdksssss.” But I can interpret babyese. It helped me, of course, that she used a lot of hand motions, inflections and facial expressions. That’s the key to understanding babyese.

After she told me all about the strangeness of our house, and I held my hand out for the insolent nightlight, she toddled off, waving her arms and babbling about how wrong it all was.

I think she said something about George Bush and the war in Iraq, too.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.