Iyyarisms

Maybe it's because he hasn't been feeling well, and I appreciate it more when he's being his usual self, but Iyyar has been ridiculously cute lately. He's had a big jump in his expressive language and every five minutes comes out with something that I know I should write down or blog or remember to tell Abba when he gets home. And later? I can't remember it at all.

So I'll open a window in blogger and see what I can remember.

1. I've been teaching Barak his ABC's, which he won't be learning in school till the year after next (Hebrew first, then English). Barak is okay with this but not wildly into it. His visual memory is not the greatest--he still has a hard time with a number of Hebrew letters and usually needs hints to differentiate gimel from nun, hay from chet, etc. Iyyar, on the other hand, can be told a letter once and, if he's in the mood, remember it forever. Last week Barak made an A page for his ABC book. I gave Iyyar some coloring to do at the same time but did not mention A to him specifically, even though obviously he was in the room at the same time. Next time the box of Weetabox comes out: "Imma! Wook Imma! Wook! Issa A"!

Hey, he's right. "That is an A! Good job!" Then,

"Imma! Wook Imma! Wook! Issa oder one A! Iss two A's!" What do you know. It is!

I showed him B and he spent some time picking out B's. I showed him S yesterday and he already knows C from C is for Cookie. Sometimes he mixes them up, showing me an S and saying A, but he usually gets them right.

2. The last three days have been better poop-wise. (Hmm, blogger seems to consider "poop-wise" a valid English word. There must be a lot of mothers of small children on blogger--ya think?) Yesterday morning he spent about half an hour crying and saying he needed to poop, but then he spent the rest of the afternoon pooping with little fanfare. I can't imagine he's still constipated with everything that's been coming out. I took the suggestion of Miriam and Dr. Google and stopped giving him cow's milk as of last Thursday, which seems to be helping.

Yesterday I had a serious talk with Barak about why we can't give Iyyar milk or things with milk, how they make him sick, etc. He told me about kids at school who are allergic to bananas and so on and seemed to get it. Which is why I was both surprised and un-thrilled to find him and Iyyar hiding under the kitchen table, with Barak spoon-feeding yogurt from a full quart container into Iyyar's mouth. I heard them giggling under there but they didn't seem to be getting into any trouble--then I saw what they were doing. I really gave it to Barak, who knew very well what he was doing--I just hope it doesn't put us back at square one.

3. I was going to talk about cute Iyyarisms, right? Okay, so, he still says "od" in Hebrew when he means "another one." So if he sees a second letter A, sometimes it's "od A!" If he sees more than one of something and wants to count, it's always "two!"

4. On the subject of numbers, this isn't an Iyyarism but it is worth noting. Barak likes numbers, the bigger, the better. "Million" and "billion" and even "trillion" and "googleplex" didn't do it for him, so he came up with "sillion" and "gotchion." As in, "I love cinnamon cereal! I love it a hundred thousand gotchion ten much! I just want to eat it the whole day!" A gotchion, apparently, is more than a sillion, so that's really a lot.

5. Iyyar is into Emese lately. He likes to follow her into our room and peek under the bed to check that she's there. All cats are Emese, including the Lego cat, which is, to be fair, small, round and gray.

6. Avtalyon is getting three upper teeth at the same time. The top front left tooth is through as well as the one to the left of that, which gives him an oddly lopsided appearance; the top front right tooth is almost through. This means that he is slightly cranky (which, for the record, would have equaled an incredibly calm and even-keeled day for either Barak or Iyyar at that age) and wants to chew on everything, including Grover's nose.

Iyyar has a Grover doll--I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this--who is now his best friend. He takes Grover just about everywhere and if he does not have Grover in his crib he will wake up and call me politely to find him. Right now, Avtalyon wants nothing more than to grab Grover and shove that big pink nose right in his mouth. There are few that Iyyar wants less. "No! My Grover! No baby! No Talyon! Not your Grover!" I'm going to have to find Avtalyon a similarly appealing Elmo or something to prevent escalation of hostilities.

7. Iyyar is picking up a few of Barak's less great habits, like the urgent screaming for whatever minor desire he might have at the moment. I'm not sure why he thinks this is a good idea, since it never gets Barak anywhere, but I guess it is part of the little brother territory. So sometimes I'll here Iyyar, in his little two-year-old voice, bellow, "Imma! Needa JUICE! NEEDA! JUICE! RIGHT! NOW!" with accompanying foot-stamps. What is very funny about this is that when he does this, he is not actually after juice. He knows quite well that he will not get juice by doing this. He just thinks it's fun. So sometimes, I'll hear him hollering in the living room, throwing a tantrum for juice--without ever bothering to come let me know about it.

8. Lately, Iyyar has taken to imitating a fire truck siren. His idea of a firetruck siren, however, is a one-second earsplitting shriek right at the upper ranges of human hearing, before you get into the frequencies of, say, dog whistles. "Imma! Fire truck do whooop!" "Actually, I think it makes a sound more like this: woooOOOOOoooooOOOO." "No. Firetruck do whoop!" At this point I agree with him, just because my ears hurt and I don't want him to do it again.

9. Sometime last week Iyyar woke up at 2 am in so much pain that, in desperation, I brought him into my office to show him Grover videos on YouTube just to distract him. It worked somewhat--he was interested in Grover even though he was doubled over and crying--and so it's not that I regret that exactly. The trouble now, of course, is that he knows that Grover is inside my computer. He knows about Grover and the soup, and Grover and the big and little hamburgers, and Grover in the baftub, and Grover singing about around, over, under, and through. "Want see Grover! Want see Grover 'nair! Want go office, Grover!" (feet stomp) Sometimes I let him see one or two, but when I've got all three of them back here it gets pretty perilous. This room is just not set up for free-ranging small children.

10. There has to be a #10, right? Ummm... oh yes. Iyyar and Avtalyon. When Iyyar and Avtalyon are together without Barak around, it is very very cute. Not always, because sometimes there are the dread Grover Wars, and sometimes Iyyar wants nothing so much as to take every toy Avtalyon touches and put it on the highest shelf he can reach--but sometimes, sometimes it is very cute. Sometimes, in fact, Iyyar is downright solicitous of Avtalyon. He shows him how to do things. "Wook, baby! Wook, Talion! Openit--no! Not like that. Not like that, baby. Wook! Dis! Dis way!"

And Iyyar and Avtalyon have something else in common, too, besides the shared love for Grover. They both sing the happy food song.