This is How We Do It In Duval.

After a long boring day at work I came home to an affectionate baby girl, which made the world okay again. I gave Mama a little bit of a break and played and danced to Mickey Mouse with LMJ. As we were bouncing around and exercising, she flew into some kind of soliloquy about the camera on the dresser and taking pictures with it. I was dumbfounded. Somewhere in the last week or so, maybe Mama knows more precisely, LMJ started talking, as opposed to just saying words. It seems like last week she would say, “Go…ina…kitchen” and that would be that until we were in the kitchen, but tonight she cut through all the BS and said, “Go ina kitchen get Grammy’s chocolate pudding”. She still sounds like she learned English from a Greek in China but it gets better every day, and she’s cute. She’s also started pretending to read books, finishing them with “The End”. This is a bittersweet time for me because the only baby thing she still does is wear diapers. Everything else is executive little girl. I also have mixed emotions because I have to be ever more careful about what I say. She’s stifling my wit. She’s taking to Ebonics more readily than Spanish, although her favorite Sesame Street segments right now are the ones with Big Bird interacting con los Latinos. Saturday I was taking her downstairs to go play in the backyard and said, “Mama, we findta go play in the backyard” and for the first time ever LMJ called her mama Mama. I was happy. “We findta go” will be part of her lexicon before she’s three, along with “y’all”. Her mother is already teaching her how to play dominos, and it’s also getting close to the time to introduce her to the wonder that is fried chicken wings. If I can get the question, “Where y’all put them chicken wings at?” out of her before she goes off to kindergarten I think it will be worth the beating I’ll take from her mother and her grandmothers. I don’t have to worry about Granddad. He’ll just take it as an honest question that he’d like the answer to as well.