Boo went to the dentist this week, and I tried to prepare him. When he woke up in the morning we sat in the chair and talked about what the day held. We were going to go to the dentist, and a nice person was going to look inside his mouth at his teeth, and then he was going to get a new toy. He was completely on board. He talked all morning about going to the dentist and getting his teeth looked at. When we got to the waiting room he was still very excited. “At the dentist,” he kept saying. The moment they called us back the screaming started. “Go back out, go back out, go back out!” he sobbed as we carried him into the exam room. He cried frantically the entire time. Kyle had taken time off work to go because I thought I’d need the help, and I did – we both had to hold him down while the dentist looked at his teeth and applied the fluoride. When the assistant held out the toy box and told him he could choose one, he immediately grabbed for this thing, the EXACT toy he chose the last time we went to the dentist.
He calmed down quickly. By the time we walked out of the exam room he was pleased as punch to be carrying his little bag with the toothbrush, toothpaste, floss and business card with a reminder that he needs to be seen again in February inside. Back home he carried the little bag around all morning, taking out his treasures and talking excitedly about how he’d been to the dentist.
I’ve been trying not to swear in front of him because he has started parroting everything, and while it’s hilarious I don’t actually want to be the family nobody else wants to be around. When a postcard I had carefully addressed smeared, I said “gosh dang it.” He found that really exciting and took some creative liberties with it. For the rest of the morning he chanted “god damn dang it.”
Aside from swearing he’s mostly just been calling everything dirty. It’s because of this toy car, which we call the dirty white car, and a matching green car we call the dirty green car. Everything gets called dirty. He likes to pair that with also calling everyone “guy.” When he points to somebody outside we get nervous because we don’t know if he’s going to declare them “guy” (acceptable) or “dirty guy” (less so). At the Museum of Flight the other day he walked right up to two people, pointed and said “two dirty guys!” He calls everything dirty and when we correct him and say “not dirty” he usually repeats his phrase replacing “dirty” with “clean.” He eats his lunch and says “dirty cucumbers” and I say “not dirty cucumbers” and he says “clean cucumbers.” This goes on all day, every day. Occasionally instead of correcting to “clean” he corrects to “goodbye” to indicate that we’re done with the idea of the dirty item. Instead of correcting to “clean cucumbers,” for example, he might occasionally say “goodbye, dirty cucumbers.” I can’t figure out any reasoning behind which he chooses. Last night we were reading a book that said “world” and he said “dirty world.” I said “not dirty world” and he said “goodbye, dirty world.” This is why I wanted a child.
When we go anywhere, he wants to make sure he understands how we’re getting there. When we say we’re going in the stroller, he says “not in the car.” Then he repeats that, running down the list of every vehicle he knows. “Not on the train. Not on the airplane. Not in the semi truck.” We recently got Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go from the library, which, for those who don’t know, is like 50 pages of mostly made-up vehicles. This has really increased the amount of time Boo spends trying to figure out what modes of transportation we’re not taking. “Not in the hay wagon. Not in the five-seater pencil car. Not in the old time buggy. Not in the pickle truck.”
Denise Resting 
Leave a comment