Quirks of the kid

Marcus turned 2 1/2 last week. His favorite trick this week? Why, inquiring about your day, of course. He’ll ask anyone, but he likes asking Todd and me best. Over and over. “Hey, how’s your day?” We’ll answer, and then not 30 seconds later, he’s asking again. “How’s your day?” We try to explain that this is unnecessary, even a tad rude--that it implies he's not listening to the reply. We try reasoning with him, explaining that he just asked us this question. He cracks up when we tell him this. He even beats us to the punch now, saying it for us: “You just asked me that!” Then he laughs. And, with a maniacal gleam in his eye, asks the question again.

And the kid talks nonstop. A couple of months ago, his favorite thing to say was “adin.” As in, when he’s being tickled, the tickler will stop and Marcus will say, “Adin?” because he wants to be tickled some more. It still slips out occasionally.

He loves names of things. Of animals. Of streets. Mostly he loves people's names; often, he is terribly reluctant to turn to the next page of a book we're reading until everyone has been named. I usually just give up and create names for each person in the picture. "Okay, okay," I'll say, "that one is Sophie, and that one is Fred, and this is Biff, and the dog is Sparky." Then he's happy; then we may turn the page.

He had an imaginary camel friend a couple of months ago. It was his finger—his pointer finger. The whole thing backfired on me one day as we sat at lunch; I was reprimanding him, and happened to point my finger at him as I scolded. I know, I know, not a good habit... I’m trying to stop. It does nothing to punctuate the scolding, anyway--as evidenced by this exchange:

Marcus informed me as I pointed that I had a camel too. “Mommy camel.”
“Huh?”
“Mommy camel. Mommy has camel too.” He pointed at my finger, pointing at him.
“No, I’m angry and I’m yelling at you.”
“Mommy camel.” Again he showed me patiently where my camel was, even reaching out to touch my finger. "See it? Mommy camel."
I gave up. It was like trying to reason with—a camel.

Sometimes his camel is accompanied by a baby camel (which is, conveniently, the pointer finger of his other hand--with that finger bent just slightly, so it's a tad smaller and shorter than regular camel). Was I this odd as a child? Were we all? Probably.

It's a darned good thing he's cute. God knew what He was doing, making babies, kids, puppies and kittens so adorable--it's their only hope for survival to adulthood.