A Rare English Dialect

For most of the summer Chloe's daycare has been comprised of mostly girls ages 2 to 4.  When Chloe first started she was one of the only girls.  It has been cute to watch her start to do "girly" things at home that she has picked up at daycare.  Her big thing is taking care of babies.  She loves babies.  LOVES babies.  Real ones and fake ones.  At daycare Chloe's favorite baby is this little black baby.  She loves it unconditionally.  She changes the baby's diaper, rocks it, kisses it, and then chucks it on the floor. (Not because the baby is black or anything, geesh.  She does this to ALL of her babies.  She abuses her babies equally.)   She often takes her babies to her reading corner at home and "reads" them books.  Or, she will feed them Cheerios. 

Usually when Chloe is hungry she will try to climb into her highchair.  One day I was staying home with her and she tried to put her baby in her high chair.  I misread her intentions and thought that she was hungry.  I put her in her chair and then she started chucking her food on the floor.  Long story short, I ended up putting her in a time out, which resulted in a waterfall of tears.  Finally, when the whole ordeal was over and I was attempting to make Chloe help me pick up the food from the floor, I watched her carefully prop her baby up on the sofa, retrieve the tiny pieces of food, and gently feed them to her baby.  I couldn't have felt like a bigger asshole.  What a sweet girl!

I got sidetracked.  What I really wanted to write about was how the other morning I dropped Chloe off to daycare.  Makenna was there already and Emma was about to walk in the door.  Makenna and Emma are about the same age and can speak in full sentences.  I would say they are BFF's.  When Emma walked in she said "Makenna, I wanna play on the seesaw."  Then Makenna said "Emma, I wanna play on the seesaw!"  This exact dialogue went on a few more times until the girls were so excited they started jumping.  As soon as the jumping ensued, Chloe, master jumper and leaper extraordinaire, came running into the room.  Chloe looked at both girls and said "yaba oohba gabba mo" which clearly meant "I wanna play on the seesaw, too!"  Unfortunately, Chloe still speaks a rare English dialect.  I'm afraid that her baby talk must have translated to "sometimes my poop has corn in it," because immediately after she said it the girls fell silent and stared at her blankly. 

At first I laughed.  Chloe didn't miss a beat.  She just turned around and ran to play with her baby by herself, but as I climbed in my car my pregnancy hormones took over and I fought back some tears.  My mind flashed forward ten years to the playground where I imagined the same scenario unfolding, and I just felt sad.  I know a certain amount of not fitting in will happen.  Heck, who am I kidding, my life was like a soap opera starting in the 3rd grade when my best friend, Shauna Hemgesberg, decided to be friends with Jessie Platt instead.  It wasn't so terrible looking back on it.  Jessie was nice enough to bully Mary Hughes into being my temporary friend until I found a new one.  And I did find new ones. 

Here I am some twenty years later a happy, married mother of soon-to-be two sweet children.  I have great friends (both old and new), a loving family, a husband who (for some reason) thinks the world of me, the world's best dog, a safe home, and a great job.  Does my heart still have a scar on it from the day Jessie Platt stole my BFF?  Yes.  Capricorns tend to hold grudges.  But guess what?  That little brat ended up being my college roomie, and we had the best year of our then lives.  I was never again friends with Shauna, because what kind of pride would I have if I had went crawling back to my ex?  So, in conclusion, it all worked out I would say.

While it would be so easy to brush off Chloe's anticipated future drama by saying "it will all work out" or "you will find new friends," I hope I can find it in my parenting skill set to put myself back in those shoes and really empathize with her.  I expect it might be tough to fight the urge to storm over to some kid's house and give her a piece of my mind.  I certainly hope that my child isn't the one doing the bullying; however, given Chloe's recent vampire-like tendencies at daycare, I'm left scratching my head about what kind of kid she will turn out to be.  Who knows?  Maybe what Chloe really said is "I vant to suck your blood," and if that is the case, I would have stared at her blankly, too.  Weirdo.