As the day progressed it slowly became evident what this was all about. Later on, Deirdre came into our room while I was in there, holding some sort of paper in her hands, and then stopped suddenly. “Drat!” she said with emphatic pronunciation, and exited the room. I thought either she didn’t like it that I had the radio on, with Christmas music playing–she doesn’t take much notice of it for the most part, but she hates a particular Christmas song so much it might’ve been connected with that–or she didn’t like it that I was in the room, which is the distinct impression I got. I left the room soon after. I noticed there was a pile of markers near the computer chair, as if she was stashing them there temporarily, to be used shortly.

Some time afterward, when I had come back upstairs, I noticed that the “No Boys or Grls Allowed” sign was on our door, this time with the “ulowd” corrected to “allowed”. I opened the door without really thinking, and came upon Deirdre crouched down working on some piece of paper, which she quickly tried to shield when I came in.

I went to do something on the computer in the hallway. Shortly thereafter Deirdre, on her way to the bathroom, came by and told me to “better not go rummaging around under my mattress pad”. Because, she explained, she was working on something that was “a secret from everyone.” I assured her that I certainly wouldn’t go rummaging around under her mattress pad. She gave a little sigh as if I didn’t understand, and said, “What I mean is, I’m hiding it there, and it’s a secret from everyone, so don’t go rummaging around.” I again told her I wouldn’t, but she attepted to explain a third time, telling me that it wasn’t a mattress pad on her bed–just one somewhere in the room, so don’t go rummaging around anywhere in the room.

Deirdre has been enjoying making cards for various occasions lately. She made at least 5 cards for two cousin’s birthdays recently, the number increased by the fact that due to weather conditions we didn’t go to the planned event at which they would have been given. So, instead of going and giving them, she just kept making more of them, especially for the girl cousin who is her age. She also made a “Merry Christmas” card for “Grandma and everybody” and another one for “Grandpa and everybody” which she gave to them at the Christmas party get-together at Grandma’s house. With this disclosure that it was a “secret to everyone!” (I suppose I just didn’t get it when I saw the sign) and the fact that it was Christmas tomorrow, I realized she must be making more Christmas signs or cards.

Later on in the day, when I was making supper, Dad commented to me “There’s a sign on your door that says ‘No Boys or Girls Allowed’!!”

“I know,” I said. “She’s working on something that’s ‘a secret for everyone’.”

Dad laughed. “I had to open up the door and peek and see what monster was behind it!”

“No, Dad,” I heard Deirdre’s voice piping up from the living room. “You’re a boy, so you can’t go in there.”

“I’m not a boy! I’m a dad!”

“You’re a boy, Dad, and it’s No boys or girls allowed.”

“You won’t be able to go to bed at night!”

“Yes I will be able to,” she calmly refuted.

“No, because it says no girls allowed, and you’re a girl!”

“I can go in.”

“Oh then if you get to go in and you’re a girl, I get to go in because I’m a boy!”

“Not one boy allowed. That’s that.”

“Not one girl allowed–that’s that!”

“You’re right Dad, you can go in–because I’m done working on it in there.”

“I think you’re a midget,” Dad declared, as if that explained everything.

“You better hurry up and go in there, Dad, because pretty soon it will say ‘No Dads allowed!” Deirdre called out.

“Ohh, I can’t read that word. I’d just write on it ‘No Deirdre’s allowed!’”

That is something how the coversation went–I can’t remember the entirety. Deirdre is used to and understands Dad being silly; and she always responds in a reproving manner which makes him laugh and doesn’t discourage him in the slightest. It is funny sometimes to hear her rejoinders to him.

Dad added his own list of “No”‘s to the sign, including ‘No Midgets’, ‘No Monsters’, and ‘No Ugly People–and That Means You!!!’ When I came up at bedtime, Dad’s words were scribbled out, all except for ‘No Monsters’. Beside that was written in Deirdre’s scrawl: “And No Dads. No Bad Dads. No Bad No Bad!”

The next day when we got up, Deirdre stopped by the door and started busily erasing on the sign. Thinking she was doing this because she no longer intended her words to be in effect, I asked her why she didn’t just take the sign down. “No, I’m just erasing this,” she said, and then I saw the scribbled-out patch over the words ‘No Girls’ which she was erasing. “I scribbled it out last night so you and Titi could go to bed.” Now she was un-scribbling it to make it in effect again.

The graffiti wars on the sign continued into this morning. Dad chuckled when he saw the sign and Deirdre’s addition to it. He bent over and wrote: “All handsome men allowed” and “Only _good_ dads allowed–that’s _me_!” Then he went downstairs and goaded Deirdre to see what he had written on it. She came up the stairs putting on airs of huffiness. I read it to her, (evincing laughter from Dad) in case she couldn’t read Dad’s handwriting, and she promptly began erasing it (evincing more laughter from Dad).

—
This reminds me of a different incident I wrote down in the “Gardening Journal” (which not only has gardening and weather information about each day, but since the recordings are written by me usually, often other random information about something that happened that day, continued into the next entry or written in microscopic print in the margins when I can’t fit it in the allotted space . . .) about a year ago, in January 2007–it isn’t directly related but this occurence brought it to my mind anyway.

Deirdre got it into her head that she wanted to make a “Surprise” for Dad. With my help, she wrote, “Dad, do you want a surprise? If you do, come up to the girls’ room” and taped it on the bookshelf in the living room.

“What is the surprise going to be?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

She was still thinking up that part. “Maybe I could buy him a camera,” she told Arlie. “I have tons of money.” (At this point in her life Deirdre was very high-reaching with her ideas of things she was going to buy Mom and Dad. She whispered to me one night how she wanted to buy Dad a new printer and a new light, and Mom a beautiful dress, among other things.) I gave her the idea of booby-trapping the door, with little stuffed animals on top. She was most agreeable to this plan (Deirdre and I are related, after all). We found some of her little stuffed animals that we could balance on top of the door. When Dad came home from grocery shopping, she tried to tell him about her surprise: “Dad, I have a surprise for you!” Dad was getting an orange and didn’t know what Deirdre was trying to tell him. “Am I looking at it?”

“Yuh-hea!” she said uncertainly.

“Deirdre, show him your piece of paper!” I reminded her.

“Oh yeah!” She dashed off to show him and came running back excitedly with Dad following (only a few miles behind But he came up gamely, with all the little kids–Owen on down–rushing after and cackling. Dad started to open the door and looked up as two of the stuffed animals, probably the little sheep, fell to the floor. “Yup, I sure am surprised!” he said. Deirdre was gleeful and laughing–all of the little kids were enjoying themselves. It probably would’ve turned into something more like today if he had been retired then, as he is now.

Lots of times I be silly and make her figure it out for herself: "Hmm, who is it? I’m probably Titi, right?" to which she says "No, you’re Cadie." But this time I just said,

"It’s me, Cadie. I’m coming to bed."

The muffled quality of her voice was due to the fact that Deirdre always pulls the blankets up over her face when she goes to bed. I asked her once why she always did that, and she said, "To keep the bad dreams away." (I told her it wouldn’t do that, but that didn’t stop her.) She occasionally has bad dreams–but not only that, she is a girl with a very active imagination, so every dark shadow and shape becomes something potentially sinister. Titi and I wish she wouldn’t try to mummify herself, but at least it hopefully helps her be less scared. When Mom puts her to bed, it is standard protocol for Deirdre to tell say, "Tell, Titi, and Cadie, to come up very soon!" However, she’s normally asleep within 5 minutes, so it doesn’t make much difference.

This time, though, either she’d been having a hard time getting to sleep or Mom had put her to bed really late. The humidifier was running full blast, and the CD that Deirdre always has playing when she goes to bed, Silly Songs, was competing with that to be be heard, so when she said something I had to bend down and say "What, Deirdre?"

"Now that you’re up here, I can leave it open."

"Leave what open?" I asked. "Oh, your blankets?" I noticed her voice was more clear now.

 "Yeah. And, um, uh–" I knew what she was going to say next: "–tell Titi, tell her she should come up soon."

Feeling secure isn’t the only reason she likes to have Titi and I up there. We’re also somebody she can talk to, which is more fun than going to sleep. She piped up again several more times after that, each time sounding like she was saying something simply because I was in the room for her to say something to.

Things such as, "I can see the stars out my window. Sometimes I can see airplanes going by, in the morning!"

Or, "It seems like this CD will never end." Since she usually falls asleep before it gets very far, it seemed like it was going on for a long, long time to her.

And, "I just love that song." (It was "Winkum, Winkum" in case you’re wondering.)

And then, as if she had run out of other things to say, "Hi, Cadie." 

Helloo–we’ve both been lying in our beds for awhile now, and now you suddenly feel a need to say hi? I replied, "Oh, well that’s all very nice, but how ’bout instead we say goodnight and stop saying anything?" I really didn’t mind her talking at that point, especially since it was a nice change from everything being "Titi, this" and "Titi, that" at night. But I didn’t want to encourage her.

She said "what?" and we both kept saying what to each other for awhile until I turned off the CD player so we could hear better. "Now, what did you say, Deirdre?"

"I said–I just said, I didn’t hear what you said, after that, before–after that," she said, having a bit of a hard time getting out what she meant. "Oh. I just said–" Now I was the one who felt tongue-tied. This happens to me frequently, but I thought it was funny that I should be so awkward talking to my 3-year old sister. "I just said, it was nice…I mean…it was nice of you to say–(just skip to the point, I told myself)–I mean, just say goodnight instead, and then we’ll stop talking!"

So we both said goodnight, and stopped talking.

                                                        *    *    * 

At one point I went downstairs to check the barometric pressure, because I have been trying to record that every night and when Deirdre mentioned the stars, it reminded me that I forgot to. Before I went downstairs, Deirdre told me, "While you’re at it, tell Titi, soon she have to come up!"

 I dashed downstairs, glanced at the symbol on our min-max thermometer that shows whether the air pressure is rising or falling (Lachlan, who was juggling with Titi at the time, saw me and said, "Gosh, she needs minute-by-minute updates!") and delivered the message to Titi. When I was back upstairs, I told Deirdre, "I told Titi what you told me to tell her. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Tell Deirdre I said, ‘Bwa-ha-ha!’" I laughed, and said, "What do you say to that?"

"Tell her, TOO bad, you have to come up anyway!!" she said. I knew she would be undaunted.

Deirdre likes to play with toys. She likes to play dolls and things. She likes to make them suck on pacifiers and she carries them around and doesn’t want anybody to hurt her babies. Deirdre always wants to join our game, but we say, “No, Deirdre, you can’t play our game, this game we already have enough people to play it, and we can’t have anybody else to.” When that happens, she just says “Oh” and toddles away kind of disappointed. One of Deirdre’s favorite games is to pretend she’s owner of doggies and me and Caleb are the doggies. She says, “Doggies, let’s go on a walk.”

I like to hold Deirdre and pat her little belly, and she likes to snuggle. And I think it’s very funny of how she talks. She talks in a kind of “wobbly-wobbly”, back-and-forth way.

One time she was very scared of this dried-up glue. It was a big amount of some kind of dried up glue laying around. She ran around, screaming around, and fell into my arms, and held me tight! And I said, “What’s the matter Deirdre, what’s the matter?”

“I’m scared!” she said.

And I said, “What are you scared of?”

She said, “I’m scared of that thing over there!”

At first I couldn’t see what she was talking about, but then I went over and saw it was just dried-up glue. Then she started going “Aaah!” and clutched onto me again really hard.

“What?”

“They go “Ribbit! Ribbit!”

“Wew, I say dey go Fwiggit-Fwoggit, Fwiggit-Fwoggit,” Deirdre asserted. “Bunny wabbits go Wibbit-Wabbit.”

“Yeah,” I mused, “Collin and the little kids used to always think that frogs went ‘Friggit-Froggit’ and rabbits went ‘Ribbit, ribbit.’”

“She knows the traditions!” Mom said. “But really truly,” I stated again for Deirdre’s information, “People say that frogs go ‘ribbit!’ and bunny rabbits just don’t say anything.”

But she was not to be deterred from her quite sensible idea of what noise animals make. “No, wibbit-wabbits go Wibbit-Wabbit, Wibbit-Wabbit!” she insisted.

It’s very logical, you know; Ribbit-Rabbits go “Ribbit-Rabbit”, and Friggit Froggits, as the little kids sometimes call frogs, go “Friggit-Froggit”!

“Following this logic, one would think chickens go Chicket-Chucket, Chicket-Chucket,” Titi said. “

Well, Deirdre knew that was nonsense. “No dey don’t, dey go (she threw back her head to give a mimickry of a rooster crowing) ‘Er-ee-ER-ERRRRR!’” Technically, chickens cluck, but everyone knows crowing is more fun!

Earlier on while Titi was brushing her hair, Deirdre told Titi that she was very cute. Hmm…getting a little vain, perhaps? “Oh really! Who said that?” Titi inquired. “Oh…Temmy just readed it somewhere,” Deirdre explained.

It wasn’t quite so nice when she woke up in the middle of the night, as she often does. She tossed and turned, whimpering, “Uh! Uh! Uh!” over and over. Sometimes she cries during the night, but a lot of the time she just does this. It gets to be like Chinese torture–each “Uh!” is like another drop of water, driving you crazy. Titi had told me she didn’t have her flashlight with her, so she couldn’t shine it on her to wake her up as usual. And there was no sound from her now, so I guessed it was up to me to see what was wrong with Deirdre. I tried as hard as I could to pull myself out of my sleepiness and make myself talk. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Deirdre?”

No answer. She never answers when we ask, which is the frustrating thing. But then I heard her whispering something; “silly goose” was the only word I could
catch. “Silly goose! Whisper, whisper, whisper, silly goose!” I couldn’t
tell what she was saying, but the fact that she was actually saying something
was a good sign; it meant she was actually awake for me to be able to make her to be quiet. “Want a blanket on?” I asked her. “Yeah!” she whispered, sounding
satsified, and went back to sleep. The next day, Titi told me what she’d been
saying. She’d been saying, “Silly goose! You’re supposed to be sleeping in a
tent!”–because we slept in tents while we were at the Highland Games, as
Deirdre knew. As soon as she realized we were back, she was able to go back to sleep.

Titi and I–in fact, all of us–don’t go places very often, and even
more rarely are away overnight, and when we are, Deirdre notices. She may just go on doing all the things she normally does and not think about it, until you ask her, for example, “Where’s Titi?” Then she stops and thinks about it, and repeats, “Where’s Titi?” But even if she doesn’t notice at any other time, she’ll definitely notice at the supper table. (Even when she was a lot younger, she used to yell for people to come to the supper table.) She’ll keep asking, “Where’s so-and-so? Where’s so-and-so?” Then even once you tell her, she’ll keep asking it every now and again to hear the answer. She always wants to know where people are; at night she’ll sometimes whisper to Titi, “Titi! Titi! Titi!” until Titi finally answers her. Then Deirdre asks, “Where’s Cadie?”–even though I’m sleeping inthe bed right across from her as usual. It seems very strange to her to have someone gone when she’s so used to them always being there.

The next morning Titi talked to Deirdre about us going away. “Did you
miss me?” Titi asked her. “Yeah,” Deirdre said. “Did you miss me so much you cried and said, ‘Boo-hoo, I miss Titi?’” Titi continued. This is the way a
lot of the question-and-answer games we have go. If we ask Deirdre a question
and she says “Yeah,” then we ask it again in greater degrees of extremity.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said again, even though we both knew she didn’t. “Did
you ask where we were at the supper table?” Titi asked.

“Yeah.

“Who sat at my spot at the table?” Titi asked.

Deirdre gave her a big chipmunk-faced grin and did her favorite trick of relay-the-question. “Who sat at your spot at table?” she asked Titi right back, instead of answering the question.

“I don’t know!” Titi exclaimed. “Who sat at my spot at the table, Deirdre?”

“Who sat at your spot at table, Titi?”

Deirdre thinks she’s very clever when she does this, so this would have gone on for a while, except that Titi broke out of the circle by saying, “Did…Temmy sit at my spot?”

“Nope-nope-nopey!” Deirdre hooted. “Guess again!”

So Titi guessed again and again, going through all of the names. Each time Deirdre would cry “Guess again!” with immense pleasure. Finally Titi cried, “Well, who did sit at my spot?” Deirdre threw herself backwards on the bed and kicked up her legs. “Me!” she cried. “I already guessed that!” Titi said. It didn’t matter; Deirdre didn’t really know who sat at her spot (in fact, no one sat at her spot), but it was fun to make it up when she was the center of attention.

I chimed in on the conversation, too. I asked her if she had fun on the treasure hunt that Titi and I made for the little kids to do while we were gone. She said “Yeah,” in that same distant tone, but when I asked her what she got, she promptly replied, “Um, photos!” I had stuck a couple of printed-out photos in with the stickers at the last minute. Deirdre loves photos; that’s treasure enough for her! But considering she didn’t mention the stickers, I wondered if she ever found them. When I looked inside the pouch where I’d hidden the stickers, sure enough, they were still there. “See, Deirdre? It’s a bag of stickers for you!” I said, holding it up. “O-oh!”she cried. I showed her what each of them were, which she was very interested in. Every time I showed her one, she’d say “Oh!” If I said, “See, that’s a doggy,” she’d say happily, “Oh, it’s a wittle doggy!”, as if it was the greatest thing in the world. Then if she found one she recognized, she’d hold it up and give her interpretation of what it was: “Dis such-and-such, Cadie!” Each one was fascinating to her. Once she got downstairs, she promptly started peeling them all off and plastering them all over a piece of paper. She
knows what stickers are supposed to be used for, and she wasted no time in
doing it!

Deirdre sat up in bed and said, “Hi, Cadie,” when I came up the first
night. “Hi, Deirdre,” I replied. I had thought she would be asleep by now–Mom
had put her to bed a while ago. I knew I was going to have a hard time
getting used to how the rooms were, but I thought she would be laying there on
the bed, out like a light. Instead she was watching my every move very
carefully, asking me,

“What’re you doing? What’re you, doing, Cadie?”

“Getting undressed.”

“Oh.”

“What are you doing” and “What” were her favorite things to say to me,
and she continued to say them as I sighed and fumbled about for my stuff in the
dark. She wanted to know what I was doing down to the very last little thing. I
had a couple of bug bites on my ankles from a recent trip up in the woods, and
now they were throbbing with itch. So even though I knew I shouldn’t, I started
scratching them. Along with this went many exclamations, like “Oh! Argh! Ouch!”
Deirdre snapped up in her bed.

“What? What?”

“My bug bites are itching me, that’s all. Ooh! Arg!”

She knew just what to do about that. “You need put band-aid on
them, Cadie!” she asserted confidently. Dad had put a bandaid over one of her
bug bites to keep her from scratching it, and now she is convinced this is what
you must do every time you get a bug-bite. She proceeded to tell me very
earnestly about her bug bites, a most fascinating subject. “I got, one on, my
arm, and, one on my foot, and band-aid on bugbite on foot, and band-aid on bug
bite on arm, and tons of bug bites.” I told her I’d just put my sock over my
foot to keep it from itching, and went to bed.

This was not the end of her narrative, though. She tossed and turned,
saying things like “My shoulder hurts” or “My foot hurts” or any other body
part that she could think of. Then, after laying in relative silence for a
while, she piped up, “I wanna sleep in dis room. I wanna sleep in dis room.” I
didn’t get it. Congratulations, you want to sleep in this room. “You want to
sleep in this room?” I asked her. “No, I wanna sleep in dat room,” she
clarified. When I went over to her I realized that she was pointing out the
door–to her old room.

“You can’t sleep in your room, Deirdre,” I explained to her. “You’re
sleeping in this room now.”

“But, I wanna, sleep in dat room,” she insisted.

“I know you do,” I said. “But the rooms got switched
around, and now you sleep in this room. You can’t sleep in your room.”

That didn’t deter her one bit. “But I’m going to,”
she told me confidently, as if to say, “Well, you can have your room
switched around if you want, but I’m going back to my old one!” She
continued earnestly, “I’m going, sleep in my room, probly. Probly, I sleep in
my room–fink so!” (“I think so”.) She was fiddling with something with
her hands and had that faraway look in her eyes, like she does when she’s
thinking hard.

I tried again. I went for a long explanation, hoping this would satisfy
her: “No, Deirdre, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like it. I don’t, either. But
you know what? Rundy and Lach-Lach switched our beds around, so my bed’s over
there, and your bed’s in here, and your room’s going to turn into a sewing room
for Titi. Because it was too hard for Titi to do her sewing in here.”

“Oh,” she said, and there was a silence as she processed that
information. Then she got back to square one again. “But–I want to sleep in my
own room!” she exclaimed.

I gave up arguing and went back to bed. She, on the other hand, sat up
and declared, “I’m going sit up, wait for Titi!”

“Do you want me to go downstairs and tell Titi to hurry up?” I asked
her. She replied, “Yeah!” urging me, “Hurry up, Cadie! Hurry up, quick quick!”
I did my duty, hurrying up “quick quick”, and came back and told her that Titi
said she would be up there in a little bit. When she did come up, Titi asked
her, “Whatsa matter, monkey-face?” Deirdre told her mournfully, “I wanna, sleep
in, my room.”

Now Titi got to argue it with her. She explained it all to her–telling
her that she sleeps with the big girls now, and that her bed isn’t in
her room anymore, it’s in our room now. Deirdre would say “Oh” in a distant
voice and then insist again that she wanted to sleep in her room. When Titi
told her that her bed got moved into our room, Deirdre asked, “But, who’s
sleeping in my room?” Titi laughed and said, “Nobody’s sleeping in your room,
monkey-face! Your room is going to be turned into a sewing room for me!”

“But, I sleep in it anyway!” Deirdre insisted stubbornly. That
made Titi and I laugh.

Deirdre kept tossing and turning and talking for another couple of
hours. “Who’s dat?” she asked when someone came up the stairs. “It’s just one
of the boys, going up to bed in their room,” Titi explained patiently. But then
when the next person came up the stairs, she asked again, “Who’s dat? Who’s
dat, Titi? Somebody coming in my room?”

So Titi said again, “No, it’s just one of the boys going up to bed.”
There was a silence. Then Deirdre whispered, “Where’s Daddy, Titi?”

“In bed, sleeping,” Titi replied. Then Deirdre continued on with
everyone else: “Where’s Mommy? Where’s Temmy? Where’s Caleb?” Each time Titi
would answer her, and then she’d think up another thing to say. It seemed like
she was just trying to think of as many things as possible to say to keep from
going to sleep. “Do you need me to sing you one last song, and then you’ll go
to sleep?” Titi asked her. “Yeah.”

“Okay, what song do you want?”

“John Brown, had little in-yun.”

So Titi sang her “John Brown Had a Little Indian”, under her breath, and
Deirdre sang along, quite pleased. “There, now you got your song. Now you’re
going to lay down and go to sleep, right?” Titi said. But Deirdre said, “Now
you need song, Titi!”

Titi agreed to that. “Okay, how about if me and Cadie pick the same
song, and we sing it together? How about ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness?” Deirdre
loves that hymn, and she can sing along with most if not all of it, even though
she doesn’t really understand it. So Titi and I sang it quietly, with Deirdre
singing along, skipping words to keep up with us: “Gwey, dy, Fa-a-ay-ness, oh
Goh my fah-er–no shaa-ow of tur-ing wif dee…”

“There,” Titi concluded once we were done. “Now we all got our
songs, and now we’re going to lay down and go to sleep,
rightDeirdre?”

“But Cadie needs song!” Deirdre protested.

“Cadie got her song!” Titi argued back. “I sang ‘Great is Thy
Faithfulness’ to Cadie, and she sang ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ to me!”
This time it was my turn to muffle my laughter, at the thought of me and Titi
singing goodnight songs to each other. Deirdre thought for a bit. Then she
caught a loophole. “But, you need, sing, ‘Gwey Thy Fay-ness’, to me!”
she cried. Titi and I laughed. “How ’bout if I just sing you ‘Rock a Bye
Baby’?” she asked. (That’s the last song Mom always sings her before she puts
her to bed.)

After getting her Rock-A-Bye Baby song, Deirdre didn’t ask for any more
songs, but she still didn’t settle down and go to sleep. She kept losing her
pillow, or blanket, every 5 minutes, it seemed. “Can’t find my pillow. Can’t
find my pillow, Titi!” she’d whisper frantically. Then Titi would turn on the
flashlight so she could see where her pillow went. In the midst of her constant
fidgeting, she bonked her her head slightly. She sat up and whispered, “I
bonked my head! Titi, I bonked my head!” When Titi didn’t answer, she cried,
“Where Titi? Where Titi go?!” When Titi said, “I’m right here, Deirdre,”
Deirdre repeated, “I bonked my head, Titi.”

“How ’bout that. Maybe if you stopped fidgeting around and kicking
things, and just laid down and went to sleep, you wouldn’t get your head
bonked!”

“Oh.”

It seemed there was no end to the things she would say. Either her
diaper hurt, or she claimed a spider was crawling on her and “bod’ring”
(bothering) her, or she couldn’t find her pillow for the millionth time, or
something else. Most of all, though, she said things were “boring”. (Titi
thinks she meant something more like “upset” by it.) She said her different
parts of her body were boring, and she moaned, “Titi, I’m boring!” One time
Deirdre coughed and said something that sounded like, “I’m a boring cough, in
my eye.”

We didn’t know what in the world that meant. “Yes, you’re a boring cough
in your eye,” Titi agreed, and we both laughed. Deirdre fell asleep chanting,
“Boring, boring, boring, boring…”

The next night, the situation was the same. In an effort to help her
sleep, Titi got her two little stuffed animals, a little bear and a turtle, to
keep her company, and brought in the clock that used to be in her room. That
way, when she closed her eyes, at least it would still sound like her
old room–”Tik, tok, tik, tok.” I think the stuffed animals did help some–she
certainly liked them, although now she’d keep saying, “Where my bearie go?
Where my turtle go?” I was kind of glum when I went to bed, and I sighed and
told Deirdre I wished my room wasn’t switched around. She was silent for awhile
and then she said, “When I get bigger, Rundy and Lach-Lach, switch rooms, I
sleep in my old room–when I get bigger, Rundy and Lach-lach switch rooms
around.” I realized she was saying that when she got bigger Rundy and Lachlan
would switch the rooms back again, perhaps to comfort me. When Titi turned on
the light sometime after we’d gone to bed, so that Deirdre could find her
turtle or something like that, Deirdre asked me, “What’re you doing, Cadie?”

“Same thing as before. Going to bed!” I said.

“Again?!” she cried, sounding shocked. “But I thought you’re
sad, Cadie!”

“Sad” was her favorite word that night. Later on she was telling Titi
that “It’s sad. It’s sa-a-a-a-d,” dragging the word out mournfully.
“What’s sad?” Titi asked her. “When you go, house-cweaning, come home five
o’clock, it’s sad,” she told her. Titi and I had been going housecleaning every
day, and we came home at 5:00 just like she said, although I didn’t know how
she knew that. Titi tried to tell her we were all done going housecleaning
(which was true), but Deirdre kept insisting that we were going to go
housecleaning again and it was sad. (When we actually went, she never minded
too much though!) Titi told her the things she was going to do the next day
instead of going houscleaning; one of the things was going to pick broccoli in
the garden, so we could eat it for supper. Deirdre informed us that, “It’s
sad, eat broccoli for supper.” That made Titi laugh, too.Yesterday
everthing was “boring”, now everything was “sad”!

Eventually she got used to the room and stopped talking so much. It was
exhausting, but amusing as well, those first couple of nights when she wouldn’t
stop talking!

“Ohhh…you mean you want me to put a wormie on your trowel, like I did for Justy, don’t you?”

“Yeah!”

Justin had just come and got an earthworm from me to feed to the chicks a little bit ago, so Miss-copy-cat wanted to, too.
I rummaged around for some worms. Ahh, there was one! I put it on Deirdre’s trowel for her. Instead of running off to feed it to the chicks, though, she just watched it. She was delighted by it, which surprised me because Deirdre used to think earthworms were utterly, unbearably gross. The worm was wiggling a little bit on her trowel. She started giggling. “It’s moving!” she cried, as if that was something amusing. She seemed to think the worm was something novel that you watch to see all the funny things it does, like a clown. Every time it slithered or wriggled the slightest bit, she’d giggle and say gleefully, “It’s moving!” She seemed to feel a need to tell me everything it was doing. “It’s coming out!” she kept saying. “It’s coming out! Look at wormie! (giggle, giggle)”

“What’s the wormie coming out of?” I asked, not understanding what she was talking about. “The wormie! It’s coming out! (giggle, giggle),” was all she said. I realized the worm was sort of stuck to some little stick, that she thought he was “coming out” of. But it looked more like to me he was chopped in half and stuck to a stick. I told Deirdre, “You know what I think? I think he got hurt. I think he got chopped in half. And he said, ‘Ouch, that hurt!’”

“Oh,” she said, thought about it for a nanosecond, and then elaborated for me a Deirdre-version of a worm going “ow”: “Wormie go, ‘AOOOOOOW!’” she yelped. It didn’t bother her that it got chopped in half, but it was fun to make noises for it!

She dumped the worm off suddenly. She was bored of it. “Put it back. Get ‘nother one!” she ordered me. That worm’s entertainment ability was used up, apparently; she needed a new one now. This one was just as funny as the last one, from the sounds of her giggling again behind me. “What’s so funny?!” I demanded, even though I knew really. “Wormie–laughin’ at wormie,” she said. It went on like that; Deirdre kept saying, “Get ‘nother one!” And then as soon as I got another one, she wanted to put it back and get another one to laugh at. The next one I got for her, she decided was dying. She said very sadly and morosely, “It’s dying.”

“It’s dying?!” I exclaimed. I wonder what put thatthat idea into her head! It looked like an ordinary worm to me. “Yeah,” she said sadly. “Put it back. It’s dying. Get ‘nother one! Get ‘nother wormie, Cadie!”

But I couldn’t get worms as fast as she was ordering new ones.”Deirdre! Not until I dig another one up!” I exclaimed. “Oh,” she said, and then added brightly as and afterthought, “I’w hewp you!” I laughed. “Oh, you are, huh.”

“Yeah.”

(“I’ll help you” is Deirdre’s favorite thing to say, or do: as Titi says half-jokingly, the phrase that sends dread into the heart of all its hearers.) But first she got distracted trying to feed grass to the chickens. She stuck a blade of grass through the fence and said, “Here chicken!” Then, frustratedly: “Chicken won’t eat grass. Here chickens!” I had to inform her of the sad fact that chickens don’t eat grass. So she went to go pull out grass along the fence. That was her “help”, which she did very cheerfully–proclaiming to me the whole time, “I finding wormies! I finding wormies! Cadie, I finding wormies!”

“Deirdre, you have to find them in the spot that’s already dug!” I tried to tell her. She just said “oh” and kept ripping out grass and saying, “I finding wormies!”

Since I was digging up sod, I guess she figured she was, too. “You have to use the trowel,” I explained, figuring that at least she’d understand. “Oh. What towel? Where towel? Where twowel go?” She looked all around for it, turning her head in every direction, even though it was right by her. “Deirdre! Right there! Right in front of you!” I leaned all the way over from where I was kneeling and pointed at it. She picked it up, but still said, “Where twowel go?” Ilaughed and said, “Deir-dre! It’s in your hands!” She dropped the trowel as if it was a rattlesnake and snapped her hands up. “What? What hands?” she cried, which made me laugh even more. She obviously didn’t realize that the “shubbel” she had was called a trowel. “Deirdre,” I explained, pointing to it, “this is called a trowel.”

“Oh,” she said, and started to help me dig with it. “I dig with shubbel. Is twowel, really,” she amended. It made her feel very important to dig alongside me, but she got bored of it pretty soon. Once she was tired of finding wormies, she toddled off to find something else to do.

The other night
after supper, when we were washing and drying supper dishes, she came up to
Teman (who was washing), swinging her sippy cup in her hand. “Wash dis Temmy,”
she said. Then the next thing I knew she was saying to me, “Turn on, light!
Turn on, light!” and then toddling off to the dark bathroom to show me what she
was talking about.

“Why? What are you going to do?” I asked. You have to be
careful what you help Deirdre do, or you might be helping her get into
mischeif. She said she wanted to get a washcloth, and then I understood–she
was planning to help clear off the table, one of her favorite things to do.

“How ’bout we get you a tissue,” I said, because she had a runny nose. But she
didn’t want to be sidetracked from her task.

“How ’bout, get wash-wash!
(washcloth)” she retorted pointedly.

I got one for her, got it wet, and handed
it to her. She carefully shut the cabinet doors and toddled off with it to go
wipe off the table. She works hard to get what she needs to help.

She went on busily helping, taking care of anything she found. She
collected silverware and other things off the table to give to Teman to wash
and carried an egg carton over to me to put away.

Then she noticed the piles
and piles of eggshells on the table left from having scrambled eggs for supper.
You could just see her thinking, “Hmmm…what should I do with these?”

Before
she could get into them, I said, “Wait, Deirdre, let me get a container for you
to put them in, a measuring cup.” She knew that you were supposed to put
egg-shells in a measuring cup to microwave them. (We often microwave egg shells, crush them up, and feed them to the chickens. The microwaving and crushing is so that the chickens don’t recognize it and try to peck open their own eggs.) I went and got one, and told
her, “Put them all in here, and then we’ll microwave them.”

Now that she had a
job to do, she became very engrossed in piling all the eggshells into the
measuring cup. When she was done, she didn’t have to wait for me to tell her
what to do; she picked it up promptly, stood up, and stated her intention: “Mi’ wave it.”
(“Microwave it.”)

“Whoa! Deirdre! Don’t drop it!” I said. Normally you wouldn’t expect a
toddler to carry something glass all by herself. But she was holding it very
carefully, so I decided to let her (supervising her). I helped her to put it in the microwave and
press the buttons; it was very satisfying to her to do everything
herself. She watched it for a while as it microwaved, and then got bored
of it and ran off to do something else. I chased her into the living room and
played with her for awhile. When we were in the kitchen she ran away for a bit
toward the microwave, and then yelled out to me loudly,

“It beeped!”

(The microwave beeps when it’s done.) I went to check. “No, it didn’t
beep, you silly goose!” I said to her. She just assumed it was done. But then a
little while later, she cried “It beeped!” again (I think she might’ve just
liked saying that), and this time it really had.

She wanted to carry the
eggshells out herself, but I told her they were too hot. So she just toddled
after me as I carried them out and waited to see what to do next. I showed her how to break them up with a knife
or fork.

“I do it! I do it!” she exclaimed impatiently.

She grabbed the knife
first, because that’s what I did, and tried very hard to jab them, but it
didn’t work very well. Her little hands weren’t coordinated enough to make much
difference. So I picked one up and crushed it with my hands, knowing once she
saw me do it that way, she would too.

Immediately, she picked it up and crushed it with her fingers
too…and another one, and another one. She became completely absorbed in what she was doing,
sitting there on the chair that was too low down for her and reaching up to
smush eggshells with her fingers. Eggshells dropped down to the floor as
she went, unnoticed by her. The only thing that was important to her was making
sure that the next eggshell got crunched up.

I wasn’t paying much attention to
her, but then I suddenly noticed the eggshells on the floor. “Deirdre! Don’t
put them on the floor. Look, they’re all going on the floor,” I pointed out to
her. “Keep them on the table, okay?” I pulled her out of her reverie to
look down at all the eggshells, so she would understand what I meant.

“‘Kay,”
she responded, and went back to what she was doing.

By now she had most of them crushed, and she stood up on the chair to
fish around for any more she might find. Seeing as she was mostly done, I asked
her, “Do you want me to get you a container, Deirdre, to dump it in?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I helped her dump it into a container, and then she
had even more fun. Now it was easier to play with them, since
the container was wider, and she had fun swishing them around with her hands. Somewhere along the line, “business” (doing the job) had proceeded into
pleasure. But she was still very protective of them and didn’t want anyone else
to touch them. If some little kid came along and saw what fun she was having,
and tried to crush one too, she yelled indignantly, “Nooo! I doing it!!” Then
when just crunching them got too boring, she dumped some back out onto the
table, and into different containers on the table, and then back into the first
container again.

The end of this great fun was when she had to go to bed!

“First we have to get these cans,” I told her, and Deirdre watched as I leaned down to get some cheddar cheese soup cans. All the while I made supper, I explained to her what I was doing, and sometimes why as well. She listens carefully and watches my every move very intently, and reminds me to do something if she thinks I forgot. Then whenever I say anything, she repeats it very importantly. If I make any kind of exclamation, she repeats it with exaggerated emphasis. If I say, “Oh no,” Deirdre cries, “Oh, no-o!” as if the most wonderful thing in the world just happened.

“Here, you can have this one,” I said, and handed her a can to put on the table. Then we had to open them all up. “Splort!” I said as I opened up one of the lids and the gooey yellow liquid showed through. “Spwort!” Deirdre echoed behind me happily. It’s great fun to say words like that, you know!

Deirdre knew just what I should do with the cans. “Dump it, ‘hat kind (that kind, meaning that one),” she said, turning around on her chair to point to the pan on the stove. “That’s right, we’re going to dump it in there, but not yet. First we have to get the milk,” I told her. (“Miwt,” Deirdre repeated.)

I got up onto a chair to get a can of condensed milk, and she came toddling back and forth to get the can I handed to her and then put it on the table. But the second can was missing, so we had to go ask Mom about it. Deirdre was eager to do everything I said. I explained we had to go ask Mommy, so she exclaimed, “Mommy!” and then sat on my hip quietly while I was talking to Mom upstairs. As long as it was part of the expected protocol, she was contented; it’s only when we start doing things that aren’t part of the plan that she gets impatient.

Deirdre stood on a chair next to me, watching intently as I stirred the milk into the cheese mixture, seeming to think it was quite fascinating. “Yummy, yummy, yummy,” I said absentmindedly as I stirred it. “Do you think it’s yummy, Deirdre?”

“Yummy,” she said. We often have conversations like this. We go back and forth between two opposites until Deirdre decides for sure which it is. “Or do you think it’s yucky?”

“Yat-ey,” she affirmed.

“Is it yummy or yucky?”

“Yummy,” she clarified. “Yummy!”

She was quite sure of it now. “I think it’s yucky,” I said, but she still insisted it was yummy. “Okay, do you want to try some of it?” I asked, holding out some on my finger, but now all of a sudden she drew back cautiously. Wait a minute, she was just carrying on a conversation, not talking about real life! She took a little taste. “Yummy,” she still said vaguely at first. “It’s yummy? Do you want some more?” But then suddenly she registered the taste, and she shrank back.

“No. No. Yat-ey!”

It wasn’t really that bad, but it was still funny. I laughed and said, “I told you so!”

At one point, she started hurrying off toward the den, repeating something to herself that sounded like, “Go, get it, warsh, go, go!”

“What?” I asked her.

She turned around and looked at me earnestly. “Warsh, go-go!” I could only figure out maybe she was saying she was going to get “Go-go” (Jo-Jo), her doll, so she could watch. But she forgot all about it when I asked her if she wanted to do something else.

Deirdre was very interested in the process of opening tuna cans and squeezing out their juice, which we did next, and took charge of commanding me how to do it. She kept up a running commentary that consisted of: “O-ten (open), that kind. O-ten, this kind. O-ten, o-ten, o-ten. Squeeze it. O-ten that kind.” All of this while she was shoving the cans in my direction, giving me my order of what I was supposed to do with it! The last can she reserved for herself, and cried, beaming, “DER-dwe, ‘at!” (The “‘at” was supposed to be “that”, meaning “that” one was hers. Usually Deirdre is pretty good with her usages of “this” and “that one,” but not that time.)

At first she waited patiently while I opened and squeezed the can, because I told her it was too hard for her. But then she got fed up with how slow I was going, and grabbed the can opener to do it herself. She lifted it up and put it on the can, just like I did, concentrating hard, quite confident she could do it. But nothing happened. “Hard,” she told me, putting it down. “I told you so!” I sing-songed at her.

All while I opened the tuna cans (which takes forever, in case you’re wondering) she kept on talking in a long string of one-syllable words that I didn’t bother to figure out. Mom came downstairs holding something, and Deirdre cried goofily, “Ooh–Mommy!–get it!” (Translation: “Oh, Mommy’s got something!”)

“Uh-oh, I ran out of room,” I said to Deirdre, as the cup I was filling up with tuna juice filled up. I went to get another cup, a little blue one, which, Deirdre informed me, was “Der-dwe’s cup.” She couldn’t understand why I was squeezing the juice into that cup, instead of the big one like I was supposed to. She tried to get me to dump the little cup into the big one. “Dump it, right there, that kind,” she said, she said, pointing at the big cup, to make it quite clear where it was supposed to go. “Deirdre, it’s full,” I explained. “Full,” she repeated with satisfaction, and stopped pestering me.

Deirdre scooped out some of the tuna fish out of the can into the cheese mixture herself; I figured it wouldn’t matter if she spilled a little. She worked at it very studiously, scooping out tiny bits of tuna fish and shaking them off the fork into the pan while I grabbed cans and emptied them. After that, there was only one thing to do, of course. “‘Tir it,” (stir it) she ordered me.

“No, we have to get the celery flakes first,” I said. “Cew-wy fwates,” said my echo, and toddled after me into the den to get them. It was hard for me to figure out which one was celery flakes, and I told her, “Go ask Mommy–no, Titi, if that’s celery flakes.” Sure enough, when I came into the kitchen, I could see Deirdre toddling off into the dining room to ask Titi. But then suddenly she noticed the movie in the other room, and in spite of herself, without quite meaning to, her feet started carrying her that direction. I yanked her back where she was supposed to go, and she held up the bag to Titi half-heartedly, not quite remembering what she was supposed to say.

It was celery flakes, as far as Titi could tell, so I went off to finish supper. But Deirdre wanted to watch the movie now, and I didn?t get her back as my helper till awhile later, when I was rolling out the crust for the tuna pie. “Oh Deirdre!…Deirdre!” I called to her, and went to fetch her, because she wanted to watch me do that. She was sitting mesmerized on Collin’s lap, as she recounted to me as I carried her into the kitchen. (“Collin, lap,” she said.) All of the little kids came into the kitchen a little later, since the movie had ended, and they began to have snack. Then Deirdre decided having snack was now much more fun than helping make supper. It’s always fun when she does, though!

“Oh! Well, then, are you my little. . .porcupine?”

“No!” she says cheerfully.

“Then are you my little. . .orangatang?”

“Nooo!” She says, as though I was making a ridiculous statement, throwing back her head and dragging out the word.

“Well, are you my little. . .kangaroo?”

“No,” she says in her squeaky little aren’t-I-cute-when-I-say-no? voice.

“Maybe you’re my little armadillo!”

“NO!” she yells.

“How about my little penguin?”

“No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o–” Deirdre, in case you hadn’t noticed, knows 101 ways to say the word “no”.

“Then are you my flamingo?”

“-o-o! Pang! Pang!” She stops off half way through her “no” and starts talking very earnestly at me, peering up into my face.

“Oh! Are you my little penguin?!”

“Pang!” In that satisfied, contented voice only Deirdre can conjure up.

“Oh, you’re my little penguin! Are you a nice penguin?”

“Nice!” Game over. Now we go back to whatever we were doing before. (You’ll note she never actually said yes, by the way.) Sometimes I guess what she is on the first try. Sometimes it takes forever for me to guess. Yesterday I had almost exhausted my list of exotic animals that I could think of when she decided she was a buffalo. I don’t think she has any idea whatsoever what a buffalo is, but she certainly decided that was what she was. I suppose she just listens to the words till she finds one that she likes. She’s always something different, too. But in reality, we all know what she is. She’s my little nut-case!