Daddy Up-Down

I took enough Spanish class to get me through the miminum requirements needed in college.  I traveled to Mexico a bunch and practiced it there, and I was fairly decent in the language.  When I started working as a nurse, I fumbled my way around communicating with Spanish-speaking families.  I was feeling rather proud one night when introducing a family to the unit, showing them were things were, what the IV was for, and how the call light worked, all in Spanish. 

"Preguntas?" I asked them, hoping of course that they'd say no, they did not have any questions.

"Donde estan los bumpers?"  The mom asked me.

Where....are....the...the...bumpers?  What the heck are bumpers??!

"Uh, que?"

"Bumpers.  Bumpers.  Donde estan los bumpers."  She looked at me expectantly.

"Uh...."

The Mom pointed to the child's diapers.  "Bumpers."

Aha, Pampers! 

I remember another time accompanying a Spanish-speaking family to their child's x-ray.  I didn't know the word for x-ray.  But I sure knew every other word to describe it.  So I said something like, "we're going to take pictures, special pictures of your daughter's, uh, the things she breathes with, to see how she is doing. "  Miracle of miracles, the mom totally understood that I was trying to describe an x-ray of the child's lungs.

Oliver is at that stage of things with his language.  There are a ton of words he doesn't know, but he knows enough words to try to describe what he can't directly label.  He wants so badly to tell you a story, but has a fraction of his language to be able to do it with.

We were at Home Depot last week buying a storm door.  Ollie sat in the cart while Michael moved the glass panels up and down over the screened portions of the door. 

"Daddy!" Oliver exclaimed.  "Daddy, D-D-D-Daddy, Daddy up-down!  Daddy up-down!"

"That's right buddy," I said in response to his excitement.  "Daddy is moving the window up and down."

"Up-down! Up-down, Daddy, up-down!"

The next night, Michael put him to bed, only to hear some chattering from upstairs an hour later.  He opened Oliver's door.

"Daaaaaaaadddddddyyyyyyy!!!!!! DaddyDaddyDaddyDaddyDaddyDaaaaaaaaady!!!" And then Oliver began a sequence of crouching and jumping in his crib.  "Up! Down! Up! Down! Up! Down!"

Que comico es mi hijo.