My children will be six months old on Friday, and I am still figuring out how to communicate with them. It is especially fun to listen to Elizabeth when she lies in her crib and, instead of crying, she just makes a series of seemingly random and unconnected noises. No doubt she is currently just testing her ability to make different sounds, and she’ll worry about assigning meaning to those sounds at some point in the near future.
The children love it when you read certain storybooks to them; they have heard the tales countless times before, but they enjoy the familiarity. And Elizabeth, in particular, loves it when you make two kinds of sounds: she loves it when you rattle vowels at the back of your throat, which leads me to wonder if she’ll want to take up Tuvan throat-singing in years to come; and she loves it when you make Donald Duck-style noises with your salivary glands or when you go all-out and blow her a raspberry.
Indeed, Elizabeth herself is forever blowing bubbles. She can’t get enough of them. Thomas is content to just open his mouth and let the drool flow freely; but Elizabeth purses her lips together and blows bubbles wherever she goes, and there have been times when she and I have had “conversations” that consist of nothing more than trading the sounds of spittle. One time, I swear she rolled her saliva the way Scotsmen roll their R’s; it was very impressive.
Why do I mention this here, and not at some hypothetical “daddy blog” like one of my friends keeps saying I should start? Is there some way I can tie this into film? Yes, as a matter of fact there is.
Basically, I have noticed that there are times when I really want to see Elizabeth smile, and instead of just smiling and cooing and talking to her, I’ll go straight for the punchline and blow her a raspberry — and she loves it! And the thought occurred to me the other day that, for all the complaining I do about movies always going for the easy laughs with fart jokes and whatnot, I may be a wee bit guilty of something similar. I’m trying to get easy laughs out of the kids, and I’m doing it by making rude noises!
Ah well. Does make you wonder who’s training who, though, no?
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