"I Want More Balls"

Tyson is finally calling me “dad” with some regularity.

He’s said it once or twice before, but over the past month he has really started to talk and that is one of the words in his burgeoning vocabulary.

                                                                    Tyson at a recent hospital check up. He said "fish"
                                                          about a dozen times while looking at this aquarium-like contraption.

This has been a long time coming with him. I only have Sydney to compare him to, but the two have definitely had different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to development. Interestingly, they seem to fall along traditional gender lines.

She was quick with talking and intellectual-type things, while she was slow with walking and other gross motor skills. Tyson was the exact opposite. Even in what they choose to focus on, they seem cornered in tradition: Sydney knew her ABC’s at a young age, while Tyson was counting before he really started speaking.

His words are still not very clear. He actually sounds a little like Marlee Matlin. But hey, he’s talking. We will still likely get him in some sort of speech therapy, but a month ago I was absolutely sure he needed intense work with an expert. Now, I think maybe just a little help will do.

He has a sister who talks more than a wife on a Real Housewives show. I am convinced her chatterbox nature has kept her brother from talking. He can’t get a word in edgewise.

The other day, he said his first complete sentence.

“I want more balls.”

Now that could lead you to some pretty interesting interpretations. I’ll save you the headache: he was talking about cheeseballs – those neon orange things that somehow pass for food.

My wife and I used to have an agreement that we wouldn’t feed our kids junk food, but somewhere in the past year or so, my wife fell off that wagon and, since I am only a secondary parent when it comes to feeding, I have no say in the matter.  Her explanation is that he is tiny, she is worried about his growth and she is going to get food in him any way she can.

At least it has given me a good joke for years to come:  “Hey, my kid took forever to talk and when he finally did, he looked at me and said ‘I want more balls.’  ”

OK, maybe not so funny.

But I love when he calls me dad.

Hide the Batteries or Sofia Vergara will be Speaking Spanish

My daughter – at the age of 1 – already has a cache of toys that could fill a corner of Toys-R-Us.

We are thinking about switching her middle name to Mattel.

Which one does she like best? Well, it is a tie between the television remote, her mom’s phone, her dad’s phone and her dad’s laptop.

That’s right. All that good money spent on toys and they come in a distant second place to anything that is not hers.

Her fascination goes beyond the shiny gadgets. She’d rather play with a photo album or a water bottle then her toys. Anything that she is not supposed to have is automatically something she wants, like a teen-age girl chasing the burn-out bad boys with juvenile delinquent records.

Is my kid the only kid like this?

It is frustrating with a capital F because I can sit her in front of this mountain of toys to play and instead she crawls over, grabs the remote and starts putting my TV into some sort of state that I cannot reverse, so that I end up watching Modern Family reruns in Spanish.

For awhile, my wife and I debated quitting our jobs and designing and manufacturing remote controls for children. They would look and act like the real thing, but have nothing to do with the television. We would trick the babies into thinking they were the real deal. We would make a mint.

Then my mom smartly said, “Why don’t you just take the batteries out?”

Out of the mouths of old fogeys...

So now, when Sydney insists on playing with the remote, the batteries come out. This is disappointing for her, because she has learned to look at the TV for changes when she starts pushing buttons.

How do kids learn such cause and effect at such a young age?

When I was a kid, we didn’t have remotes. In fact, I WAS the remote. I remember my dad yelling at me to come in from out in the yard and change the TV so he wouldn’t have to get off the couch and walk seven yards to the old black and white. Luckily, there were only four stations back then and I only had to stand there for a couple of minutes while he made a decision. Today, I’d turn for an hour as he decided between storage units, pawn shops and Real Housewives.

My daughter knows exactly what she is doing. When I have my laptop out, she stealthily crawls toward it, smiling all the way. She quietly pulls on the couch to get herself standing and then, not so subtly, begins to bang on my keyboard like a bongo drummer.

Then she looks right into my eyes and laughs. What you gonna do, dad?

She’s 1. I can tell her a hundred times “NO!” and it doesn’t register. She’s still in that delightful – for kids -- discipline-free age bracket.

We have learned to roll with it. If she is going to play with my phone, I try to put it on the ringtones setting or the pictures setting so that she is doing less harm. She loves to scroll through the pictures, delicately taking her index finger and moving them side to side. (Again, how do kids learn this stuff at such a young age???) I guess it is better than her calling 9-1-1.

One day, she called a reporter I had been dealing with through work. On a Saturday. Uggh.

My wife has started finding games on her I-Phone for Sydney to play. She likes to watch videos of Disney characters singing songs. A friend pointed out this app where a tom cat repeats everything you say. I can say “Sydney, don’t play with the phone!” and the tom cat will repeat it word-for-word. Sydney just giggles. Still, that is pretty sweet. I hope whoever invented that is a millionaire.

My wife and I would like an I-pad, but the truth is, we really shouldn’t spend the money right now. But, with all the games and things Sydney can play, it almost makes it impossible not to. It would at least give us our own gadgets back.

Maybe I can sell her toys on E-bay to pay for it.