Two-year-olds can be a real pain in the ass. Which is why I think it is very important to occasionally stop and appreciate how damn cute they are; the rationale being, the moments where you are hyper focused on their adorableness really helps to keep you from selling them to a roving pack of gypsies. Seeing as Terza has been incredibly difficult lately, a solid 8 to 9 on the My Kid is Impossible, Calgon Take Me Away spectrum, I have been trying extra hard to linger on her adorableness, which is thankfully, also very plentiful. She is abundantly adorable.
A critical support beam in her scaffolding of adorableness is the fact that she sounds like a robot. I don't remember my other kids sounding like this when they were two but, if I'm being honest, I don't remember much of the details of their toddlerhood -- those got wiped away by the flood of exhaustion, and that was as it should be, because you've got to have that euphoric recall to have the next baby and much of the terrible twos are, well, not euphoric. But as far as I can recall. they didn't have the robot thing.
What makes Terza sound like animatronic is not the fact that she Speaks. In. A. Monotone. She does not. In fact, she's unusually expressive. But she has this hilarious way of breaking her long sentences into shorter little phrases with strangely placed pauses which makes her seem either like a robot or an extra terrestrial. I think part of it is that she talks so damn much, and in such long sentences, that physically, her lungs just can't keep up with her mouth. Unlike her older siblings, she has not yet perfected the art of blabbering on and on without ever stopping for air. She still needs to breathe occasionally. So her speeches tend to go like this:
"Oh Mommy, remember when we when pumpkin picking and we saw that" pause "donkey who was so cute and his name was Dominic" pause "the donkey. I liked that Dominic the donkey because I got to ride on" pause "his back and it was SO bumpy and I laughed and I said Oh no, Dominic! You naughty donkey you!"
She reminds me of a print-to-speech translator. It's like when I ask Siri on my iPhone to read my text messages aloud and she gets most of the words right and occasionally the inflection, too, but what she doesn't get right is the pauses and the tempo. Because Siri is a robot.
Soon, Terza will have nailed down the skill of talking-without-breathing which is oh so important in our home because if you take a breath, that might serve as an indication that you are done talking, which might another family member might misinterpret as an invitation to begin talking themselves, and the one thing my children all agree on is that nobody else in the family has anything near as important to say as they do, and so they never stop talking.
I don't know where the hell they get it from.
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