Papa - You've Lost It!

Carl is now at that great age of two and a half where his vocabulary is expanding rapidly – at the rate of around seven new words a day I read somewhere – while his understanding of the context in which to use words and phrases is also growing. He has an insatiable curiosity about knowing the name for everything, and some days seem like an uninterrupted stream of “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? And that?”
His pronunciation is still a bit hit and miss – Weetbix gets called ‘Beetbix’, my computer is the ‘pooter’ and marshmallows are ‘marmos’ – but some words come out perfectly formed and all grown up like ‘marmite sandwhich’, ‘school bus’ and ‘no way!’
Carl is also capable of yelling “NO NO NO NO NO!” about thirty times in succession without seeming to feel the need to breathe, an admirable feat admittedly but one for which the novelty value has long worn off for his weary parents. Even the way he squeezes his eyes shut when he yells to stop the sheer force of his words making his eyeballs pop out of his head, then slowly opens them while remaining motionless when he finally stops yelling to check that we have indeed been watching, are suitably impressed and of course accept his superior judgement, has started to get stale. But sometimes he comes out with a classic.
Last night he was sitting on the loo to have a pee before getting into the bath. Minutes passed, the conversation had wandered from what he did at preschool that morning to oohs and aaahs over the new plant in the bathroom, until finally we broached the subject nearest and dearest to any males heart – his genitals. Like any male he thinks they are the eighth wonder of the world and just to impress upon his jaded mother what a miracle they really are, he decided to start on his favourite game again: naming things.
“Whats that!” he asked in a voice filled with amazement at the sheer wonder and perfection of it all.
“Your willy” I answered, knowing full well that wishing for this to end quickly so he can pee and finally get into the bath before the water is cold is completely pointless.
“Oh. What’s that?!”
“Your balls sweetie”
“Oh. What’s that?!”
“That’s also your balls”. By now patience is wearing thin. “Come on Carl, focus!”
Carl looked up at me, maybe realising the exasperation in my voice means a complete malfunction of my patience chip is imminent.
Looking down between his legs again, he clenched his little fists and yelled: “Focus, willy!”

His father also doesn’t escape these little gems of linguistic quirkiness. As my nearest and dearest will testify, I am not my best in the morning until I have had a shower and a cup of coffee, preferably two. Niels and Carl are exactly the same (minus the coffee) so the whole breakfast and getting ready for school ritual is carried out on a knife edge as we carefully negotiate trying to get everybody ready for the day without them noticing it. Since we moved to Singpaore we are also experiencing a strange and totally foreign phenomenon in the mornings: Breakfast Papa. This may seem like a small thing to most of you but for the past eight years, hubby has either been leaving the house at 5.35 am to go the office during the week or he’s been at sea. So Breakfast Papa is an unfamiliar creature to us, particularly because he is one of those rare individuals known as a morning person. Not only does he awake BEFORE dawn, he also gets up then and is fully functional by 7am. This for me is proof that men are indeed from a different planet.
This week I was drooping over the breakfast table encouraging the kids to get ready while Holger was in the bedroom doing that guy thing of yelling “where’s my mobile, where’s my short’s, where’s my ………….(fill in the blank with any of a thousand different things that are probably sitting right where he left them) that they do. Carl looked at me over his half eaten Weetbix and asked “what’s Papa (doing).”
“Papa’s just lost it” I mumbled.
At this Carls’ eyes popped open, he jumped out of his chair and he ran down the hallway, stopped at the corner where he could see Holger in our room and yelled: “Papa - you’ve lost it!”
At least the laughing woke us all up.