World of words

One of the most fun and funniest things about Jack and Violet growing up is hearing how their vocabularies develop.

Violet has taken to calling me "Mom-mom" and Tom "Dad-dad."  Since she (and we) already call her brother "Jack-Jack," I suppose it only makes sense to her.  She's had a "Mom-mom" phase before, but this one seems a lot more intense.  Some days, it feels like she says it about fifty thousand times.  I'll be honest, right now I'm sort of longing for her to go back to calling me Mommy.

She has quite a silly sense of humor.  When something tickles her funny bone, she'll tell me, "That's so finny."  I love how she pronounces it.

She has gotten really into "Wow Wow Wubzy," which is not a show that I ever watched with Jack.  Violet just randomly picked out a DVD off the shelf from the library (because it was the one that she could reach), and she was hooked from the first time she watched it.  Jack likes it too, since he'd never seen it before and hasn't had a chance to get sick of it.  The show's main characters are Wubzy, Widget, and Walden.  Violet has a hard time pronouncing Wubzy.  She calls him "Wubzwee," and she pronounces Walden as "Walven."

Another show that she likes is "Word World."  I think it was from that show that she heard what is currently her favorite joke:

"How do ducks know how to fly?"

"I don't know.  How?"

"They just wing it!"

I don't know if she really understands why this joke is funny ("finny," heh), but she will have me alternate telling the joke and hearing the joke continuously in the car.  She laughs uproariously every time either of us delivers the punch line.

Meanwhile, Jack gravitates to the high drama words.  No surprise there.  Sometimes I worry that he takes so many things so to heart and makes mountains out of molehills.

Jack goes to a math club with a little girl in another kindergarten class at his school.  During one session, her father peeked in.  He told me that he was very amused to see Jack very adamantly lecturing his daughter on the correct way to do whatever it was they were doing.  He said Jack was saying, "No! You're supposed to do it like this!

I asked Jack about it afterward, thinking that we would share a chuckle.  But Jack was exasperated.  "She was totally cheating!  She was supposed to move her piece this way, and she was totally doing it the other way!"

I told her that she probably wasn't "cheating," since I know this child, and she's not someone I would expect would cheat at a game.  I told Jack that she probably didn't understand the rules the first time.  

A few weeks ago, he and Violet were playing a game in the trampoline, and she wasn't playing the way that he wanted.  He stomped out of the trampoline and proceeded to sulk.  When I asked him what happened, he said, "Violet and I were playing a game, and then she totally betrayed me!"

"Betrayed"??  In his defense, this was shortly after Easter, and I think his Sunday school was a little more, um, detailed than I would have preferred about the events of that week.

Another time, I was volunteering in his class.  I have a pretty short temper when it comes to disciplining other people's ill-behaved children, and Jack's kindergarten class is unfortunately full of them.  At one point, Jack was unwisely following the bad example of one of his classmates, and I spoke sharply to them both a few times.  Jack finally asked, "Why are you being so fierce?"

Both the kids are at such fun ages right now.  Having conversations has become one of my favorite things to do with them.  I hope it's a long time yet before they stop wanting to talk to their mom.