family talk

i love hearing children mispronounce words. some of our best "family words" come from our kids' verbal mistakes. we like to get ice cream cones from "bwawm" (brahm's) and shop at "wow-mowt" (wal mart) thanks to tori's inability to pronounce her r's. we like to drink "moke" (milk) and eat "oat-moe" (oatmeal) for breakfast, in large part due to andrew's first speech attempts.

now that i think about it, we often call tori "toe-wee" (we often just shorten it to "toe") and andrew "and-woo" - or more recently, "ee-new" and "an-voo," timmy's two earliest names for him. sadly, since the first two are grown and gone, timmy has no teeny-child nicknames. i guess the other cops do call him "shep." good as it gets.

timmy was born conversing like a forty-year-old. our opportunities to add to our family's private language are now few and far between. there's "eh-ho!" (hello, until he was 18mo). "kempimals" (chemicals), said like so: "mommy, when i grow bigger, may i please help you clean the window with your blue kempimals?"

i know each child is unique, but it does make me a little teeny bit sad that we didn't have much baby talk from timmy. oh, he says puh-lenty of funny things, but it's just not the same as baby talk. so, to cheer myself up, here's a picture of timmy lounging and enjoying watching daddy trim tree branches in the back yard. please note the scrawny legs, the handsome undies and that ultra-manly hibiscus tattoo. he and daddy tried for lightning bolts from the machine, but you take what you get (daddy's is a rose, heehee).