I think Mike may be questioning my abilities to parent. He arrived home from work the other day to a fascinating scene: the boys had dumped EVERY SINGLE toy box on to the floor in the living, were booty-stark naked and were “swimming” in the “toys swimming pool” while I sat at the dining room table, finishing my dinner, checking email and wearing an overturned toy box on my head (placed there by Zachary). I think I calmly looked at him and said something to the effect of, “Welcome home. Welcome to my world.”

2 ½ year old Zachary has been a chatterbox for quite some time. He did the whole mostly skip first words and just jump into sentences thing. He does, however, have a little bit of a problem with S’s and D’s. Instead of messing with those troublesome letters he just trades them in for G’s. One day, I figured that I should step up my momminess (see example of lame momage in previous paragraph), and work on this with him. He had said something about a stick (gick). “Sssstick. Zachary. Can you say sssssssssstick?” Zach looks at me like whattup, Mama? “Gick.” “No, sssssssssstick,” I say again. “G-ick!” “SSSsssssssstick.” “GICK!!” Now, he’s looking at me like, um, what’s your damage, lady? Are ya slow or something? Why don’t you understand me? He’s annunciating GICK just as much as I’m annunciating STICK. “Ssssssssssssssssssstick.” “GGGIIICCCKKK!” He yells figuring that I just can’t hear him. We move on to dark (gark). “D-ark. Dark,” I say. “G-ark,” he responds. “De, de, daaaaaaaaaark.” “Gark.” “DARK.” “GGGAAARRRKKK.” You’re right. Gark. Totally gark. We’ll work on it another time. Maybe I’d be more convincing with a blue toy box over my head.

The boys were downstairs this morning, when I saw a dog run through our backyard. I watched as it went below the deck towards the sliding door. I ran downstairs to tell the boys to look at our canine visitor. Zach was already on to him and started screeching excitedly, “Gog! Gog! Goggie in our yard!” Matthew jumped up and said, “Thanks, Mom! I always wanted a dog!” Unfortunately all this screaming and movement frightened the dog away.
Zach ran up to the door, and in a scene somewhat like but very unlike Juliet’s “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” He smooshed his nose against the glass and shaking his head slowly back and forth, quietly said, “Oh, goggie. Where you go, goggie?” It was a sad, sad sight. I was determined to immediately remedy the situation, but I have no idea how one goes about buying a goggie.
[By the by, to save you the time, because I know you were all about to google “gog” and “goggie” to help in my search, let me tell you what’s out there: Two VERY different things. www.gog.com and www.gog.org could provide people with quite the surprise depending on which they were looking for. The .com version is “the home of Good Old Games;” as in, COMPUTER good old games. Whereas the gog.org version says: “Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG) is a non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting excellence in the quality and integrity of clinical and basic scientific research in the field of Gynecologic malignancies.” Both are very good causes but not the kind of gogs for which I looked. And don’t even get me started on all the different gog references provided by Wikipedia. Though, Zach would say that they are all VERY inaccurate to the real meaning of gog.]