Mar­tin will turn three shortly and we seem to have hit upon what I imag­ine folks refer to as the “ter­ri­ble twos”. I’ve also been given uplift­ing advice such as “two wasn’t nearly as bad as three… oh and wait till they get to four.”

In keep­ing with the theme of Maritn’s use of lan­guage, I thought would sur­vey his top ten most com­monly used lan­guage con­struc­tions for con­vey­ing frustration:

1. “BAH!”
2. “I don’t like that plan.” or “That is not my plan.”
3. “What is going on with you guys?” (One of many phrases that Mar­tin has heard from one of his par­ents and turned around to use against us.)
4. “I’m very very mad!”
5. “Go Away!” (Usu­ally fol­lowed by, “I need my space.”)
6. “I wanted to be FIRST. Hmph!”
7. “But I can do it ALL. BY. MYSEEEELLFFF.”
8. Hit­ting the near­est per­son, ani­mal or object.
9. “You did [X] and I do not like that because I do not like [X].”
10. (ran­dom sniff­ing and grunts to con­vey a mix­ture of anger & saddness)

Sev­eral of these are often used in com­bi­na­tion and the order is some­what ran­dom though “BAH!” tends to come first.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that any of these are unique to our child and in fact many of the key terms used, par­tic­u­larly “space” and “plan”, come from his preschool’s lexicon.

X-posted by [post_author] from The Mederos

Shawn had a big birthday last week (cough30cough) and we were eligible for new phones this week, so we now have a fancy pair of iPhones in our house. Hopefully having Internet everywhere makes these posts too easy .not to make. I have the wordpress part figured out and I have a camera, so as soon as I know how to upload pics with our password stuff on them we’ll be set!

Martin’s on his first of two swimming trips of the day. He’s in the wading pool with dad now and we head to the community center for mom & me lessons tonight. He loves the water and is convinced he’s already an expert with nothing left to learn. We aren’t quite as sure he’s ready for solo diving board adventures as he is!

X-posted by [post_author] from The Mederos

I woke the fam­ily up early in the morn­ing, 5:18am to be exact, and shifted us into high gear to make the Link light rail inau­gural train ride.

This one trip empha­sized the need for light rail before we even made it to the rib­bon cut­ting ceremony.

1. We walked over a bus top and arrived 10 min­utes ear­lier to take the 6:26am south bound 358 bus. It never showed up. Instead we got on the 6:41am bus that, thank­fully, did arrive on time.
2. Arriv­ing at Union sta­tion at 7am (exactly when we Sound­Tran­sit asked us to be there), we rushed through to find the shut­tle bus that would take us to the rib­bon cut­ting cer­e­mony at Mt. Baker station.
3. The shut­tle bus got lost and nearly ended up stuck in a neigh­bor­hood with small streets when it tried to turn around.

Never-the-less we did make it in time to lis­ten to some back-patting speeches and then board the first trains open to the pub­lic. We had an option of tak­ing a north-bound (Down­town Seat­tle) or south-bound (Tuk­wila) train, and I had decided ear­lier in the week that I wanted to ride to the south ter­mi­nus and then back to down­town. The entire trip was great: the sta­tions, tracks, & trains appear to be well built.

One thing that dawned on my wife and I dur­ing the speeches was that our son would never know a Seat­tle with­out light rail. Addi­tion­ally, as he reaches vot­ing age a num­ber of Sound­Tran­sit Link exten­sions to the exist­ing sys­tem will be fin­ished and Seat­tle will have to vote on when & where to con­tinue this great project — so I hope today will instill a bit of excite­ment about mass tran­sit for him. Hope­fully when he mails in his future vot­ing bal­lot, he’ll remem­ber his cranky old father remind­ing him that “it wasn’t always this easy, you use to have to take 3 buses to get from there to here.”

X-posted by [post_author] from The Mederos

Martin’s latest word fun fest involves his desired location in relation to a specific person.

A new favorite of ours is:

Pick me down

A variation of “pick me up” of course. Awesome.

Also interesting is his use of:

sit on my lap

What he really means is, “Let me sit on your lap”.

X-posted by [post_author] from The Mederos

Martin’s figured out he can swap words around within a sentence and that doing so might provoke a different outcome.

Sometimes it doesn’t work.

I want not go outside

moments later…

I not want go outside

Besides testing his world with language, Martin has many phrases (often used in a socially unacceptable ways) that tend to get a chuckle.

We’ll often be on a busy bus headed home from a long day when Martin will point at someone and say:

I want that guy get off bus.

He enjoys when people get off the bus because the door opens and the floor/ceiling lights come on. Still, these moments make you blush. Last week he at least asked someone to sit next to us.

Along the “that guy” lines, there are a number of inquisitive phrases he uses with either males or females. The pattern is usually: (WH-word) "that guy" (verb)?

What that guy do/doing?
Where that guy go/going?

Martin also has a pretty direct approach to asking for stuff:

Hey mommy/daddy read this!
Hey mommy/daddy eat this!
Hey mommy/daddy play trains in my room!

It is a fun time to be a parent.

X-posted by Shawn Medero from The Mederos