Flitsper it softly

You know what stems the flow of creative juices? (Phwoarr.) Children, that's what. As much as they give, in the form of adorable lisps and tales of bodily fluids, they take away, in the form of that son of mine who just won't fall asleep tonight and just called me upstairs again to tell me that one of his three little pigs is missing. Since these are cardboard pigs that he made at school LAST YEAR, I'm mostly surprised that two pigs, a wolf, and three houses are still around.

The other one is only asleep and missing the fun because she didn't nap today because she was too tired to fall asleep because she spent a lot of last night being wide awake, culminating in the moment when she went pink-pyjama'd pitter-patter straight past my bedroom door at 1.30am, whereupon I leapt out - I had been lying there unable to sleep, for some reason, who can imagine what; foreboding, maybe - and asked her where she thought she was going. "I was just going downstairs," she said, perfectly reasonably. Perhaps we have to get a gate for her bedroom doorway. Or a bell or something.

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Last year at his annual checkup I was concerned enough about one of Monkey's verbal tics to ask for a referral to a speech therapist: he couldn't pronouce c and g, so that "car" was "tar" and "green" became "dreen". The doctor said it was common enough, but gave me a number to call, and I called and got the forms and filled them in and sent them off. By the time they rang me up and asked if I wanted to set up an appointment for an assessment, the problem had righted itself and I happily let the nice people know we wouldn't be needing their services.

So his remaining peculiarities of speech are endearing enough that I sort of hope he won't lose them for a while. He consistently spoonerizes remote control to kemote rontrol, and he can't say "whisper". The other day he told me me, "You know that word I can't say? Well, I just said it - listen: Flistper. Flistpfer. Fwipsper. Oh. Now I can't say it again."

Then again, he's coming up with some good new things, like saying "I stand corrected" at irrelevant moments. (I blame Aquaman, who's particularly pompous.) I think he will continue to amuse, just in new and unexpected ways.