Natalie Makes Me Laugh

Post by Dan.

With Natalie around, I laugh a lot more than I used to. Here are two very funny (IMHO) things she said this weekend:

(1) Pretending.
Natalie loves to pretend. She pretends we're going to the beach, to the park, to the grocery store, but most of all, she loves to pretend that one person is bad (a ghost or a monster, perhaps), and the other person is good (a prince, or a nice wolf, or whatever). She is almost invariably a princess who needs to flee from the bad person and be saved by the good person. Of course, this raises a few concerns about her view of the role of women, but that's another story.

On Saturday, Natalie and I were playing in the living room. She was a princess, and was warning me that a bad witch was coming and was going to turn her into "a stinky mess." You could see the gears turning in her head as she said "and I'm the princess and you're the prince and there's a witch and Mommy is the stinky mess witch." Then she ran around the house for 15 minutes screaming warnings about Danielle's every movement. ("Oh no, the stinky mess witch is coming!" "Run from the stinky mess witch!" "Save me from the stinky mess witch!")

Danielle did not find this nearly as amusing as I did.

(2) The chocolate fountain
On Sunday, Danielle and I were taking Natalie to a family game night organized by her moms group. We were asked to bring bananas for holding under the chocolate fountain that the hostess was going to provide.

I wanted Natalie to be excited about going to the party, so I decided to tell her about the chocolate fountain a couple of hours before it was time to go. We happened to be outside at the time I told her, and that's probably a good thing, because otherwise my hearing might have been damaged. As I explained what a chocolate fountain was, Natalie's eyes grew bigger and her jaw dropped. In a matter of seconds, she was bouncing up an down, and when I finished, all the energy her little three-year-old body could muster exploded in cheers as she sprinted around the yard, waving her hands in the air and shouting "The most beautiful, wonderful, happy, terrific, greatest, beautiful, wonderful, yummy, happy thing! A CHOCOLATE fountain!"