Too Scary Robot
Kinnell is at the stage in language development where he wants to speak in complete sentences but doesn’t have the fluency to put it all together. So he has several phrases, and then will often fill words in with sort of a nernuhnuhneh sound. Like today he said, “Share truck, nuhnuh school, share friends. Movie nuhnuh school.” Tonight in the bath he said, “I swimming. Innuh water.” When he wakes up each morning, he’s already saying, “Go see daddy. Nuhnuh oatmeal, breafast.”
My favorite of his stock phrases is, “Too scary! Too scary robot.” Anything that’s scary is a scary robot. He also has heard me with Raimi enough that he can say very clearly, “Mayme, get up! Mayme! Mayme, count to five. One, two, free, four, five.” He actually can count higher but the numbers become increasingly less precise.
He talks a lot about sharing cars with Darin at school, about Marlys being a cat, and is, I have to believe, the most charming child ever to sing “I got myself a baby bumble bee… woma mommy nuhnuhnuhnuh me… Ouch! He stung me!”
Meanwhile, when he’s not lost in thought, Raimi will tell you lots of interesting and complicated stories. He’s reading a book called Night’s Castle, and Pixi sent him a treasure hunting game involving recognizing letters, shapes and numbers and then opening doors to look for bouncy balls… when you collect all the balls you can open a treasure chest. These two things were swirling around in his head when he told me this story, which I’m going to reconstruct to the best of my ability:
Raimi: There’s a mountain with a door in the side, and you need the secret password to open the door. The secret password is “door in the side of the mountain.” (this part was from Night’s Castle.) Inside the mountain is a treasure chest, but it’s under the water, and you can’t get through the water because of the sinking sand. There are pirates, but in the water are some balls, and you can use them to open a door and there are weapons inside–guns and swords and daggers–and you can use them to kill the pirates. And you can shoot into the mountain and the water will come out from the holes but you need to plug up the holes so the water won’t all come out.
Me: What do you use to plug up the holes? Bubble gum?
Raimi: No, wooden sticks. And then the water pushes the treasure up into the sky, up into a different world, where it came from.
Me: How did the treasure come down to earth? From a UFO? Did aliens accidentally drop it?
Raimi: It was from a space ship, but they wrapped it up and put it in a parachute so it would drop down to earth.
Raimi’s teacher wrote us a note the other day. She’d found him crying at naptime, with a book about turtles in his hands. He was really sobbing and she struggled to understand what was wrong. Finally, she understood that he was saying, “We have to take care of the earth.” She rubbed his back and reassured him that she was doing what she could to take care of the earth, and suggested he read a book that wouldn’t make him feel so sad.
She wanted us to know what had happened, and wrote to us something to the effect of, “I just know that a five year old who cries for the earth and the loss of turtle habitats is going to grow up to be a very special person.”