I’ve been tagged!  Meme tagged, that is, by my friend Carly.  I have to list my quirks, but only six.  Hmmm…so that means I have to narrow them down to six.  Okie dokie.

(p.s.  I love lists)

(p.p.s.  That doesn’t count)

1. In between bites, I have to lick my fork/spoon clean.  I have to be eating with a clean utensil with every bite.  I can control myself to not lick the knives clean, but only at restaurants.  I lick those at home.
2. Nails (as in finger and toe) gross me right the eff out.  I have no idea what the point of them are, so I cut them down to the pink.  God invented husbands for getting itchy backs and pennies for playing Instant Bingo so why haven’t nails been evolved out of us?  Toe nails with french manicures make me heave. 
3. Speaking of nausea triggers - I can’t drink ginger ale.  Ever.  Because it’s the drink we’re typically given when we feel sick, it reminds me of feeling sick.  And then I feel sick even if I didn’t feel sick before.  Also, The Killers first album came out when I was pregnant with Eirinn and Anonymous Husband loved them and played them, especially during the horrid first trimester.  Now I can’t listen to that album at all or I feel sick even if I didn’t feel sick before.
4. I’m going to bulk my quirky physical capabilities into one point because there are a lot.  I can fold my tongue in half and stick it out.  I can also flip it upside down.  I can make a pop sound with my tongue and mouth that is so loud people don’t believe that I did it.  I can push my chin out like a frog (you have to see that one to know what I mean).  I can suck the skin in around my neck you can see all my bones and tendons.  I can wiggle my ears.  I can cross my eyes one at a time as well as the typical both at the same time.  My fingers are double jointed at the first and third knuckle but not the second.  I can turn my left foot backwards with only minor assistance from my right foot.  I think that’s it.
5. I have to watch a movie all the way to the end, no matter how awful it is.  I even watched the last half of The Worst Movie in The History of Motion Pictures, AKA Gerry, in fast forward because I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off.  I feel like I would be disrespecting that first wasted hour of my life by not watching the rest.  And besides.  Maybe the ending will be awesome?  Oh, and for the record, it doesn’t count if I fall asleep.  Don’t know why, but it doesn’t.
6. I cry when I’m mad.  Even the slightest bit perturbed.  I can’t even have a mildly heated conversation with someone because I either burst out crying or get too distracted with trying not to cry that I cease to make valid points.  Like a good Canadian, I excel at strongly worded letters.  And to make this a true quirk, I didn’t cry when I was proposed to, at my wedding, at the birth of my child.  I’ve never cried at a funeral or during a sad movie.  But get me angry and I’m a blubbering bucket of wuss-juice.

There.  Is that quirky enough for you?  Probably not worthy of being institutionalized, but a bit strange, no?

Seeing as all my blogging friends (all…two of them) have already been tagged, I’ll leave this meme un-tagged.  Very uncouth, I know.   

Me: “Eirinn, you look so cute today!  You look just like a little bug.”

Eirinn: “No my not.”

Me: ”Yes you do.  You have two little pig-tails that look like antennas, just like a bug.”

Eirinn: “No my not look like a bug.”

Me:  “Yes you do.  You’re a cute little bug.”

Eirinn:  “No my not.”

Me:  “Fine.  Then what are you?”

Eirinn:  “My Baby Eirinn.”

***

Eirinn came up the stairs with the sneaky smirk of a little girl up to no good.

“Somebody pooped!“

“Who did?”

“Me!”

***

As I’m sitting with her in the rocking chair before bed.

“Would you like me to sing you a song?”

“Uh huh.”

“What song do you want me to sing?”

“Rockabye Baby On The Tree Top When The Wind Blows The Cradle Will Rock When The Bow Breaks The Cradle Will Fall And Down Will Come Baaaaaaby Cradle And All.”

I guess my job is done.

In her defense, no one told her not to…

Eirinn’s new, over-used phrase du jour is “My don’t like it.”  But she pronounces it with some indecipherable drawl.  It is “My don’t loyk it” to be exact.  Also, on occasion, “My don’t loyk it.  Any.  More.”  We’re pretty sure what she means to say is “My don’t want it” because since she started using this phrase a couple of weeks ago, she ‘no likes’ the following, among many other random things:
pants

stripey socks

non-stripey socks

shirts with a turtleneck

shirts with buttons

shirts with zippers

shirts with sleeves

shirts with sleeves rolled up

her pink coat

her other pink coat

her pink mitts

her other pink mitts

her boots

food, including that which she has already consumed a good deal of

drinks

movies that she asked to be played

tv shows which were her favourite less than five minutes ago

hugs

kisses

tickling

Mommy

Daddy

Bosco

going to bed

blankets
All of this is somehow magically and similtaneously cute and unbearably frustrating.  We absolutely adore her new found accent (which includes pronouncing Donkey from Shrek “Don-kay”) and selfishly hopes she keeps it, despite the fact that she will be made fun of terribly when she enters school.  She’s tough; she can handle a bit of ribbing.  But on the other hand, it’s awfully tiring never knowing what will please her, even after she asks for something quite specifically. 

I’m sure most toddlers go through a phase like this.  Seeing how far their parents will go to please them and how far they can try their patience before it snaps.  Luckily for Eirinn her parents think she’s painfully adorable and little things like this, while not tolerated (she does get reprimanded for being impossibly finicky), are filed away under Things We Will Remember Fondly.

This morning I was packing my snack suitcase (I have a lunch bag for snacks and a completely separate lunch bag for my actual lunch) and Eirinn saw me picking out mandarins.  Of course, Eirinn being Eirinn, asked for an “orange”, even though she knows and I know and she knows I know that she doesn’t like “oranges”.  Or mandarins.  But whatever.  I didn’t have time to explain that to her, so I just gave her one to play with.

First she threw it.  I told her it was not a ball.  She quickly turned this into a rule, shaking her finger, sing-songingly saying “Not a ball!”

Then she tried eating the rind.  Why her face didn’t screw up into a clenched little sphincter due to the bitter and the gross, I don’t know, but it didn’t.  So Anonymous Husband took it away from her.

When he left, I gave it back (don’t judge, I was busy and it was occupying her).  She then proceeded to throw the mandarin in the coincidentally perfectly mandarin-sized space between the fridge and the cupboard.

Seriously?  You really have to throw food in there?  There are starving kids in China. 

Couldn’t she be normal and throw crayons or shoes or rodents behind the fridge? 

To be fair, I can see the appeal – toddler in possession of forbidden fruit (literally), gap just big enough to fit fruit, busy mom not watching as closely as she should.  But, come on, let’s not waste the food.

Eirinn is a quirky kind of girl.  She has all kinds of them.  The usual toddler quirks like asking a ker-billion questions all in a row without waiting for an answer to any of them, or asking to get up, up, up then immediately asking to get down, down, down.  You know, the standards.

And in the past few weeks she’s started a few new things that can definitely be labelled “quirky”.  Anything that, when performed in front of a stranger, needs to be a) apologized for, or b) explained with eye-rolls, can be labelled as “quirky”.

New quirk #1 – “What’s that sound like?”

This one is certainly cute.  I don’t know where she got it from, but she wants to know what every little noise is.  It’s usually a truck, even if it isn’t.  If I don’t know what the sound was, I’ll say “I don’t know, what does it sound like?” and she’ll say “a truck” or “a digger truck”, because we live in an under-construction subdivision.

New quirk #2 – “…RIGHT NOW!”

This one?  Not so cute.  She has learned how to be demanding.  Not that she wasn’t demanding before, but now she knows how to verbalize it.  I don’t know who taught her this, but it isn’t funny.  “Have cookie, RIGHT NOW!”  “See Bugba, RIGHT NOW!” 

New quirk #3 – Two Ah-lankies

So she has these two fuzzy green blankets, two different ‘brands’.  First she liked the thin one best.  She carried this one around for about a year.  Then her and thin ah-lankie must have gotten into a fight or something because she didn’t like it anymore and she liked thick ah-lankie better.  Then thick ah-lankie was accidentally forgotten at Bugba’s house one night and thin ah-lankie had to act as a substitute.  She started calling thin ah-lankie “New Ah-lankie”, even though it was the older one.  Now she has to have both.  Everywhere she goes.  She drags both around like they were sewn to her palms.  Oh, and if you didn’t catch on, an ah-lankie is a blanket.

New quirk #4 – “I carry you?”

This means “Can you carry me?”, but she doesn’t have proper pronoun usage mastered yet.  That’s ok.  She’ll learn.

Here’s a list of toddlerisms that Eirinn recently started.

1. This one’s fun. When she starts to sing a song, I usually join in to help her along with the words and to, you know, interact with her. Now, she’ll start singing and I’ll join in and she’ll yell at me! “NO!” Ok, fine. I guess my singing voice must really suck if my 19 month old doesn’t want to hear it.
2. Also, she will NOT wear a bib anymore. Which would be fine if she was a tidy eater, but she isn’t. She’s been feeding herself for many months now but it still gets on her clothes. We’ve tried bribing her with ketchup (as in, she has to wear a bib or she can’t eat ketchup), we’ve tried us wearing one too (ya, ya, laugh it up), we’ve tried distracting her and sneeking it on. Nope. There will be no more bib wearing because she is not a baby.
3. I tried to cut her fingernails last night in the bath, where I usually do it, and she freaked out. As though she thought I was cutting whole limbs off, not just the nails. She was crying big, huge baby tears and calling for Anonymous Husband to help her (“Anonymous daaaaaaaaddy? Haaaaalp!”) and wiggling. She’s never done that before.
4. And speaking of baths, she now talks to her reflection in the tap.  AS THOUGH IT WERE ANOTHER PERSON. And this other person?  Oooo, she’s bad!  She must be very rude because Eirinn yells at her and hits her in the tummy and gets very frustrated.  The mommy reflection should be punishing the Eirinn reflection because she deserves it for being so mean to real Eirinn.
5. She’s so loud!  The yelling is non-stop and impressive.  She can reach a volume I previously would have only expected to come from some sort of electronic machinery.  And she loves to yell.  If she runs out of actual things to yell about, she’ll just yell “AHHH!!!” so that she can still hear her own voice.  Clearly our next lesson will be the difference between our indoor voices and screaming bloody murder outdoor voices.

1. A Colour Wonder marker in a light blue flavour.  That was the second one she ate.  The first one was orange.
2. A puzzle piece.  What’s a puzzle with one eaten piece?  Garbage.
3. One cell phone button.  The number 6.  Princess Cell Phone will never be the same again because if you want to remove a cell phone button with your mouth you must use copious amounts of drool.  And drool and electronics don’t mix very well.
4. And the most bizarre and surprising thing eaten all day?  Salad.  For lunch she ate a Greek salad; lettuce, feta cheese, olives, tomatoes and all.  The girl won’t eat yogurt with chunks of fruit and she ate a salad for lunch.  I will never understand her.

* Note: Besides the salad, none of these items were actually consumed, only chewed (the marker; which is non-toxic, by the way), bit (the cell phone button), and sucked on (the puzzle piece), before they were confiscated and Eirinn was reprimanded for the bajillionth time.  Who told her it was funny to get reprimanded?  It’s not.  I’m scary.  But for some reason Eirinn thinks “scary” is funny.

As promised, here is a brief history of Bosco kissing Eirinn:

The displays of uber-affection began as soon as I started giving Eirinn “tummy time.”  Any time she was his height, he took advantage and struck.  And this boy can strike from afar.  He does have a three foot tongue, no exaggeration.  Proven by science that he has The Worlds Longest Tongue.  Also, he’s been runner up in The Worlds Fastest Tongue Competition for three consecutive years.  Plus?  He’s OCD about the licking.  He can not stop.  He gets in the licking zone and there’s no breaking free.  You literally have to push him off of you before he will stop kissing you right in the face. 

So, let’s do the math:

OCD + record breaking tongue length and speed + vulnerable, immobile baby + camera addicted mother who’d rather ”capture the moment” than save her baby from dog-lick = good times for Bossy AND/OR hilarious photographic future-boyfriend repellent.

***

Case #1 – June 22, 2006

“Why, hello!  What do we have here?  A yet-to-be-licked face?  We must rectify this situation.”

“Hey-yo!  What are you, you fuzzy little person? You look so innocent and…”

“WTF!?!  In the eye?  Did you have to get me right in the eyeball?  Duuuuuude.  Not. Cool.  When I get full range of motion out of these here fingers, your fur is mine.”

Case #2 – September 28, 2006

“Again?  In the ear this time?  Gah…man, you’re good.”

“The eye, too?  Touchè, old friend.  Touchè.”

Case #3 – September 8, 2007

“It’s been a long time, com-padre.”

The boy’s still got it. 

***

Some things will never change.  As long as Bosco has a tongue and is able to stick it out, someone, somewhere, maybe even you, is getting it in one of their facial orifices.  And if you complain?  Well, he’s less than a foot tall.  What were you doing with your face so close to his mouth to begin with?  I think at some level you wanted him to lick your molars…

And until Eirinn stops finding it funny or they discover that dog saliva up the nose cavity causes cancer, I’ll be there to laugh and document and share with the world.

Is this gross?

Whilst eating fruit from a tray, Eirinn proceeded to use the pre-forked pineapple to transport the yogurt dip from its container to her tongue, where she licked it off using an unreasonable amount of saliva.  And repeat.  And again.  Pineapple makes a great spoon, don’t you know?  It tastes like barf, but can scoop a mean amount of dip.  She double triple quadruple dipped the drool-soaked pineapple into the yogurt.  That we were all using.

Not so much?  What about this – 

Midway through eating the pineapple yogurt dip, Eirinn casually laid down, face on the ground, butt in the air, right where we were eating.  When her butt was asked what it was doing, her face replied “*grunt* Poop. *grunt*”  Grunt.

Still cute?  Not gross enough for you?  Wait for it…

When she stood up from her very vocal, public “elimination”, she smiled, proclaiming “Poop!”  As in “I’m done.  You may now do whatever it is you do in order to remove said feces from my diaper because it’s icky and I don’t want it touching my flesh any longer.”  While I appreciate the information, there’s nothing like stating the obvious, if you smell know what I mean.

Because her face was sticky from being used as a yogurt dip mop only minutes prior and then used to balance on the carpet while her bum was decidedly further north, it was now caked in a random scattering of cat and dog hair.

So picture it.  Her face layered in remnant sticky yogurt and various animal fur while trotting around with quite a fragrant pant load.  Pretty.  One of those moments where you wish you had a camera ready to capture it, to be used as blackmail at a later date when she brings some sleazy-looking idiot boy around.  Oh, and if the camera had Smell-O-Vision that would be even better.