Finding Melmo

Sheesh, the pressure! I'm starting to feel like Marlin the clownfish in "Finding Nemo" -- "Hey, you're a clownfish? Say something funny!!"

Write something funny, WRITE SOMETHING, DAMMIT!!!! I didn't realize how many of my friends and loyal readers (all three of them) depend on this blog to entertain themselves during horrendously boring meetings and conference calls. Alright alright, I'll try to do better.

HALLELUJAH, we finally found something else Molly will eat for dinner besides chicken nuggets EVERY DAMN DAY OF THE WEEK PLEASE GOD MAKE THEM STOP HAUNTING MY DREAMS!!!!!!

Last night we had Noodles and Company for dinner because, well, it being a day that ends in "y" meant that I was not going to cook anything. I had my usual healthy staple, buttered noodles with parmesan and chicken, extra cheese thank you very much. Molly finally decided that pasta might not be such a bad thing (phew - I was starting to doubt she was mine. Thank God for the mother-daughter resemblance or people would REALLY wonder) and took a tentative bite of my greasy, butterific noodles.

And another.

And another.

Did I mention that in addition to signing for "more," she can now SAY "more"?? In the span of 15 minutes she ate half my bowl of noodles and yelled "more" so many times she sounded like a broken record of "Oliver."

Except that in "Oliver," the cute little urchin says very politely, "Please, sir, may I have some mohhhhr?" in a very proper British accent; and my cute little urchin says "MAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!" and points at the object of desire with more precision than a champion German shorthair on a duck hunt.

Her vocabulary has been growing by leaps and ba's lately, which is dangerous considering she is getting much more adept at parroting what people say and she does, unfortunately, live in a home where her two parents have spectacular linguistic range when watching sports -- none of it suitable for children under 25.

My friend Kathy could tell you all about this danger, as her little miss A was the delight of many a party as she was learning to talk, and her daddy yelled at a Michigan football player named McClintock who screwed up some play or another (as Michigan players are increasingly wont to do) -- "Way to go, McClinCOCK!!!!"

Miss A gleefully piped in, "Cock. COCK!!" and repeated this ad nauseum (fueled, no doubt, by the rest of the grownups who kept asking her to say it -- none of us parents yet at this point, so none of us realizing this behavior would one day come back to bite us in the ass. Butt. Heinie. See, I am incapable of censoring.)

Much to the dismay of several probably-much-better-at-this-than-me mommies I know and love, Molly loves to watch TV (specifically Sesame Street), and LOVES the Sesame Street characters. Of course, making Mommy want to put her head in a nutcracker and smash it to bits, her favorite Muppet is Elmo. Mommy wonders how she made it through her own entire childhood without this annoying pronounically challenged interloper popping up all over Sesame Street, but alas, he is now a regular fixture and, alas even more, (alasier?) he is firmly ingrained in Molly's limited vocabulary.

"Melmo. MELMO? MELMO!!!!!"

Sigh.

She is also a big fan of Ernie ("Heinie!") and Grover ("roh-rov?" not sure about that one yet), and -- gasp, horror or horrors, her favorite thing to play with at daycare? DOLLS. WHO IS THIS KID AND SERIOUSLY, HOW DID SHE COME FROM MY DNA?!?!?! Of course, every doll regardless of age or gender is "Baby."

To those who scoff at the notion of kids learning from TV, yesterday, while watching Sesame Street, the letter of the day was "B" and there was a segment where a big yellow schoolbus drove across the screen. Molly looked up at me and said "busssssss." Kind of in a tone like "God, you big dummy, see that thing?? It's a BUS. Catch up, mommy."

I thought maybe I was high from the chicken finger fumes so I ran to get her plastic school bus, sat it in front of her, and said "Molly, what's this?"

"BUSSSSSSS."

Well, thank God we can watch Jerome Bettis now and she'll know what to say.

I'm off -- I have to go find Melmo. Elmo. Nemo. My sanity. Whatever.