Watcha doin?... Toilet. Daijoubu. Falling asleep in the bath.

Watcha doin?... Toilet

Sean likes to follow me to the toilet. He no longer tries to get a close up look into the bowl (putting his head right in the flight path) or grab onto the glittering stream. Now he runs in and looks up and shouts "Whatcha doin? [short pause] Toilet". I think it must be something he picked up in the creche because the phrase just suddenly appeared, shouted confidently on a regular basis. Now he uses it in other contexts. A fart results in a laugh followed by "whatcha doin? Chin chin". "chin chin" is Japanese for "penis" but clearly Sean has a slightly broader meaning for it or a horrible medical condition that we haven't yet noticed. I'm not sure he's even asking a question, it seems to just mean that something interesting is happening or he's just saying hello.

Daijoubu

"Daijoubu" is kind of Japanese for "don't worry, I'm OK", usually it's a response to someone asking you if you're OK. A few times a day, Sean will just suddenly say it without prompting. I turn around to find him upside down hanging off the couch or worse, half-way up the stairs and I can only wonder what awful tragedy he narrowly avoided.

Where's Riona for all this?

Why am I posting all this stuff about Sean and nothing about Riona? Riona has morphed from a cute and amusing, small animal into something much more like a small human being (yes I am in danger of anthropomorphising children). She isn't doing anywhere near as much funny stuff, stuff that betrays an almost complete lack of knowledge about the real world. She is, in fact growing up... but not too much.

For the 3.5 weeks I was in Japan, I think we pushed the kids too hard with trips out to this and that and a week in Okinawa. The result was frequent breakdowns from Riona and one total meltdown from Sean, who is usually the voice of calm and contentment in our family. Riona fought over ridiculous little things that were in hindsight, I think, protests at being dragged out here or there to meet some friends of ours. Sean's meltdown was on the way back from Kamakura, when he was just completely sick of being on trains and started screaming and screaming and screaming. I tried taking him for a walk in his buggy while still on the train. All that did was introduce a furious, screaming child to carriage after carriage of disapproving Japanese commuters. We had to change trains and Midori bought some sweets and just a single toffee square was all it took to return (poor) Sean to his usual happy, playful self. He spent the short ride home playing peepo with 2 slightly drunk business men.

The funniest incident with Riona was a fairly common case where she had a bath before bed and then didn't want to come out of the water. This time she was so tired and grumpy that she ended up falling asleep mid-protest. She was slumped in the corner of the bath (don't worry I was in the room with her). I took some photos of her but I'm pretty sure that posting them on the Internet will get me done for kiddie-porn. I'll just save them for my power-point presentation at her wedding.

No ni sai - how to ruin your child's second birthday.

The first of a few random snippets on what Sean says and does that I find amusing. For some reason, Sean's stock-phrases are much more likely to be in Japanese than Riona's were, maybe because Riona had full-time daycare in Ireland for a while and Sean never had.

Sean is almost 2 years old and still does a little bit of breast-feeding, mostly in the middle of the night. Midori is trying to end this and sometimes stops his attempts and tells him "mo sugu ni sai" which means "you're nearly 2" ("ni sai" means "2 years old"). Sean now gets grumpy and starts saying "no ni sai, no ni sai!". Sometimes just for divilment we'll say "mo sugu ni sai" to him to wind him up and it works. All good, innocent, infant-bullying fun.

What might be a problem is that Sean is 2 on Jul 15th and he'll be in Japan for that. I'm not sure what Midori is planning but he'll at least have a cake and the family around him, all repeating that dreaded phrase "ni sai, ni sai, ni sai" and he'll have a big grumpy head on him, shouting "no ni sai! no ni sai!".

I wish I could be there to see it! Obviously, I wish I could be at Sean's 2nd birthday anyway but he'll have lots more birthdays and it'll be a long time before he has another where he gets upset by anyone who mentions his age.

Infantile coprophagia and numerical synthaesia

I watched a very interesting documentary a few years back when Google video first started. It was about a Daniel Tammet, a semi-autistic savant who learned to speak icelandic in a week, could memorise thousand of items and perform incredible calculations. He "suffered" from synthaesia - a condition where the senses interfere with each other. Some people can "see" sounds or "smell" colours etc. Daniel Tammet could see numbers, they had particular shapes and colours and it was consistent - a week later, the same number would have the same shape and colour.

So what's that got to do with infantile coprophagia? The participants shall remain nameless to protect them but a couple of weeks ago (let the record show that it was Tue March 25th 2009) my youngest child was left alone briefly with a nappy loaded full of my eldest child's poo. When my wife returned, she found that not only had he tucked in to a tasty treat and was smiling a joyous brown smile but he had decorated the floor, the toys, the books and anything else he could get to.

So while I have no reason to believe that he will be an autistic savant, he does know what number 2 tastes like...

Mamma chin chin all gone.

Bathing Seán while Ríona is around always results in the following conversation, although tonight it got a bit surreal. "chin chin" is Japanese (and maybe Chinese) for "penis" by the way.

Ríona: [seeing Seán naked] chin chin! chin chin!
Dad: yes, baba's chin chin
Ríona: My chin chin?
Dad: no, you don't have a chin chin
Ríona: my chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: mamma chin chin?
Dad: no mamma has no chin chin
Ríona: Mamma chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: An pan man chin chin?
Dad: ehhh.. you'll have to ask mamma about that.

The end is nigh.

I was at a kiddies' playground at the weekend and I overheard one dad say to his angelic 3-year-old daughter, "now play normally, I don't want to hear you talking about taking anybody out". WTF is the world coming to?

I kept an eye out when she was near Ríona but didn't get close enough to check for the mark. I should probably have got her name so I could make sure I was on her side when the apocalypse comes!