“Who dat guy, NiNi?” I asked Heidi this morning on our way to work.
Heidi didn’t even answer. The phrase was shorthand for us, meaning something like that fellow looks a bit sketchy, if you ask me. The person I was referring to was no threat at all, just a man in a sloppy flannel look shirt with messy hair and a sour look on his face in the 3 seconds it took us to drive past him, but I did notice him, and I had the language to report my reaction thanks to our niece, Annabelle, who originated that expression one morning when she was about three years old. She was watching The Lion King with her nanny, Monique. “Who dat guy, NiNi?” she asked when the villain, Scar, showed up.
“You know who he is,” Monique told her.
“That’s Dar;" Annabelle affirmed, "he's bad," because narrating the scary parts of the movie helped her to manage her anxiety about them.
Heidi and I often laugh about how many phrases we have appropriated from the children in our lives over the years. “I can and I will,” is a common affirmation for us, coming from the time when 3-year-old Treat had to be moved away from the Christmas cookies he was trying to filch. Sitting in a chair next to a mirrored chifferobe he gave his reflection an angry little pep talk. “I can and I will have those cookies,” he avowed, shaking his fist.
When Riley was almost three and the center of our attention as the only child in our lives, he shocked us all by padding over to our naughty black cat, Silly. When they were nearly face to face, Riley swung his right leg back as far as he could, winding up to give Silly a big kick, but losing his balance instead and landing on his own diapered butt. “Why did you do that?” we asked in shock.
“I just wanted to kick him over,” Riley explained.
“He can be annoying,” I agreed, and so an expression of irritation entered our vocabulary, and there are definitely times when just kicking something over sounds pretty good.
Once, when Josh was three, we drove up to visit him and his mom. He was excited to see us, and even more excited to show us his new stuffed hamster. As he cuddled it proudly, I heard a rustling in the corner. "What's that?" I asked.
"That's my other hamster," Josh said. He shook his head sadly. "She's not a hodin' hamster."
"She bites," explained Michelle, Josh's mom. Years later, we would use the description to explain why our rescue cat, Penelope, was so skittish: she just wasn’t a hodin’ kitty, and that would have to do.
Like many three-year-old boys, Richard was truck-obsessed, and he loved all the construction vehicles that were doing work in the neighborhood. One morning we were out on the front porch when a digger rattled down the hill at a pretty good pace for one of them. Richard ran along the railing as it rolled by then came to a jump stop. “That guy is moving,” he cried, pointing both index fingers after it. Later on I put together a little plate of carrots, hummus, cheese, and turkey for him, he paused with admiration. “Well! Isn’t that a healthy lunch!” Around our place, both of those catchphrases come in handy all the time.
When Kyle was three, he was afraid of our dog Isabel. He had never had the chance to be around dogs, and so he would run away whenever she got anywhere close to him. To help him get used to her, Heidi would hold Kyle on her lap and call Isabel over. “No! No!” he resisted. “Her will get me!” which is the perfect terminology for many imagined threats. And later, when he grew to love our dog, Kyle called her Lisabel, and that was one of our favorite nicknames for her.
Of course all of these words, so funny and true, were elevated by the light of the three year old speaking them, and so we heard and remembered.
