7XMOM: Through the eyes of a 21 month old

It is to the delight of David and me that our 21-month-old granddaughter, Ali, and her parents are living with us for a few months until her daddy’s job in Dallas starts.

Without all the stress that comes with parenthood — we leave that to her parents — having her around is pretty much total joy. But, boy, is she active. I have never, and I mean never, seen such a busy child. She’s even busier than my oldest son who was always into something.

Ali lives in a world of verbs. At first, I thought they were gerunds, but no one really ever knows what a gerund is, so let’s say verbs.

But Ali, who is quite verbal, translates everything in her world into an action word, i.e., verb.

“Jumping, jumping. Jumping, jumping,” she says when she is bouncing all over the place on the children’s trampoline we have in the basement.

“Climbing, climbing,” she says as she crawls up behind me in my office chair as I am working. I welcome the distraction.

She also says “climbing, climbing” as she literally climbs up the front of her high chair and into it to eat. She also climbs up on the kitchen counter and the dining room table, where she crouches down, grabs her legs behind her thighs and says, “Sneaky walking. Sneaky walking.”

She climbs into the bathtub with her clothes on, on top of the shaky Lincoln Logs tub and on top of the toy box. “Climbing, climbing” all day long.

“Dumping, dumping” happens in the sandbox a lot. She fills up the bucket, dump truck or hakader (helicopter) and dumps it out. She hasn’t quite learned, though, that she needs to dump the sand back in the sandbox, not down through the planks of the deck.

When she gets annoyed by the sand on her hands, she directs me to fill the bucket or toy dump truck and then she dumps it. We have done a lot of “dumping, dumping” lately on these warm, sunny late afternoons.

The funniest is “running, running.” That verb usually follows something she shouldn’t be doing but has gotten caught doing after we have momentarily lost track of her.

One day last week I found her “dipping, dipping” her Sunday shoe into the cat’s water.

“Ali, no,” I said. She dropped the shoe quickly and took off across the room, looking back over her shoulder and saying, “Running, running.”

That was repeated a few minutes later when she grabbed up a purple crayon and wrote on the deck window. She threw the crayon at me and took off, yelling “Running, running.”

She’s energy with little restraint; I’m tons of restraint with little energy.

I chased her into our bedroom the other day when she snatched the bag of cacaroni (pepperoni) off the counter and ran into the room, stuffing pepperoni into her mouth. She threw that down as she yelled a “running, running,” quickly followed by a “spicey, spicey” and a drink of water.

We try not to, but we are usually “laughing, laughing.”

She still has a little trouble with pronouns (takes the place of a noun) because she’ll come, put up her little arms and say, “Hold you. Hold you. Hold me.” Her mother has said “Do you want me to hold you?” so often that she just hasn’t yet figured that one out.

Then her days are nouns. There are “color days,” “Play-doh days,” “(maca) marker days” and “book-a-book-a-book” days when she climbs up into the monstrous Love Sac she calls the “mountain” and pulls out her “new books, new books” from her library bag.

Her day is filled with excitement for the ordinary that we adults no longer see—until a grandchild comes to visit.

Ali said this morning, “Hold you. Hold me,” so I picked her up and she said, “Maca day, Grandma.” I said, “Grandma has to work.” She answered, “No, no, Grandma, maca day.” And that sounded so much better than working, working.