Conversations with Guy, Volume I: Chapter 3

I got to enjoy another Glanville visit recently, and Guy is doing a lot more in the way of actual sentences now, which is fun. And though he’s not actually reading yet, there were a couple times that I opened a favorite book at random and he said exactly what was on the page. He also calls me “muncle Tandava,” which is adorable.

One thing he’s doing a lot now is pointing enthusiastically at anything that catches his attention, and exclaiming “LOOook!” It’s especially cute when you ask him what it is he’s pointing to, and he replies in the exact same tone of fascination and amazement, “I -o- KNOOOW!” He’ll do this with all sorts of things, “regarding with equal gaze,” as the Bhagavad Gita says, “a clod of mud, a stone, and a bar of gold.”

He’s also counting now, and especially enjoys the 1-2-3 game (as in: count to three and then do something together, usually eating a raisin or something). I made him count most of the time, and he pretty quickly found ways to trick me with it. The obvious way was 1-2-eat-the-raisin-early. One version I particularly liked was “one... two... thr-YOU count!” Another time he went “one... two... [long pause, thinking] ... what comes after [s]even?” That got such a laugh that he started doing it deliberately for a while, with his grin that says he knows perfectly well that he’s playing to the crowd.

Another time, I tried to trick him, but he saw through it. We were rehearsing animal sounds at the time. (I liked to get him to work on “hiss” for snake, to practice his S’s.) Then he got distracted, as he often does, and pointed up to a vase on the table: “LOOook! Flower!” So naturally I asked him “What sound does a flower make?” Just to see what he would do. He stared at me for a few seconds, clearly thinking hard, then said “I [s]mell it!” Not gonna put one over on him, no sir.

Lacey also told me about one of his best new words, though I didn’t get to observe it “in the wild,” as it were. Apparently he has an oscillating fan in his bedroom, and at some point, someone told him that word. Then one day, he was walking along a curb, with one foot up on the curb and one foot off, rocking up and down as he went. Lacey asked him what he was doing and he said, entirely unprompted, “I’m off-ill-ating!”