Otter update: No and Oh nooooo

I know some of you are checking in for Otter updates, more than for my musings on parenthood, so I thought I'd add periodic quickie updates on Otter's actual activities.

Yesterday he was home with me for the Columbus holiday, and ---setting aside my objection in principle to the day as a holiday, and my hypocritical secondary objection that if it's going to be a holiday, G should get it off--- Otter and I had a lovely day together.

I got much housework done when he was playing intently on his own, and at one point I looked from the kitchen into the living room (which we use as one big playpen) and he'd pulled out every oversize board book in the basket near the fenced in TV. He was sitting surrounded by piles of books and had a Sandra Boynton touch and feel book open to the last page, where there are two little birds under eggshell-shaped flaps. The text asks if you want to go back to the beginning (the fuzzy fuzzy guy) and start the book over, and one little bird has a bubble that reads "yes" and one has a bubble that reads "no". (Grammy Pat may well remember reading this book with Otter.)

So Otter was pulling back the flaps over the birds, and saying "no" and then closing the flaps, and then opening them and saying "no" again to himself, over and over.

I know we're bibliophilic parents who own more board books than most libraries (and that's NOT an exaggeration), but at moments like this one, I feel pretty good about that. With board books, he can browse books all by himself and grab and pull at the ones we read together, and they don't tear or get damaged.

Later that afternoon, he decided he wanted me to read "Chicka Chicka ABC" to him over and over and over again. This book is the board book much abridged version of the alphabet book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and I read it with the tune from the Scholastic DVD of the full story. This board book version ends with all the letters falling out of the coconut tree (halfway through the real story), and the last line goes: "the whole alphabet on top of the--Oh noooooo! Chicka Chicka... Boom! Boom!" as all the letters fall out of the tree. Of course, saying "Oh nooooo!", I would clap my hands to my cheeks.

When we got home last night from our signing children potluck, Otter went straight to Chicka Chicka and shoved it into my hands, saying "Oh nooooo!" and clapping a hand to his face.

If we get the kids we deserve, in some other lifetime either G or I or both must've done something pretty good for the world.