Toddlers are sometimes hard to understand, but it threw me off more than usual when my two year old started demanding “camel eggs” for breakfast one morning. It was hard to imagine what she wanted, yet the words seemed so clear.

After a few demands, I finally figured out what she was after, and prepared her some scrambled eggs. First time she’d ever asked for that particular breakfast.

My son’s favorite toy is an 8 foot long flexible pencil he calls his ‘hooker.’ He uses it to hook things, and at 3 years old, such a term just makes sense to him.

But I just about lost it the other day when he was dressed in his dragon costume and started looking for his hooker. I always thought they preferred maidens.

Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing.

We’re waiting for the plumber right now. It seems that the house we live in, built in the ’60s has iron pipes. The one going to the sewer has rusted shut and must be replaced.

Fortunately, this only seems to be impacting the kitchen, so we can live pretty normally. But my 3 year old son was so cute about it when I told him I couldn’t wash dishes in the kitchen sink (bathroom sinks are miserable for washing dishes, just miserable!).

“Why not wash in dishwasher, why?” he asked. Kind of fun explaining to him that the two are connected. But I love that he understood the function.

My son woke up at about 2 the other morning, just crying for Mommy, so I went in to check on him. He couldn’t be consoled by anything other than my presence, so I lay down to snooze with him for a while. He kept tossing and turning, and finally asked if we could go to my bed to sleep.

So we tried that. He fell asleep for about an hour, then suddenly sat up.

“This not working!” he said in the most frustrated voice.

The rest isn’t so cute, since he threw up after, but I still crack up thinking about the tone of voice he was using.

My son doesn’t talk too clearly yet, and like a lot of toddlers uses some interesting word choices. Such as this morning’s conversation:

Him: “Me need hoo ker.”

Me: “You need what?”

Him: “Me need hookER!”

It took me a minute to realize that last night he had been playing with one of those punching bag balloons and using it to hook onto things, driving his sister nuts. This, of course, was his “hooker”.

Good mom that I am, of course, I asked him if there was something I needed to know.

edited to add:

He’s still at it, but now the “hooker” is an 8 ft long flexible pencil he got for Christmas. I just about lost it when my husband was coiling up the pencil and my son started going on about “Daddy tie up me hooker!”

contributed by Sam 

It amazes me sometimes how much poop a toddler can produce. I thought I was off the hook the other morning after changing a particularly nasty diaper. No way that kid had more.

But of course he did. And it wasn’t just a regular poop. No, this was the Super Duper Destruct-O Poop. You know. Huge, spilling out of the diaper. Stomach turning scent. The works. We won’t discuss the number of wipes it took to clean his bottom off. I think the back yard hose would have been better if not for the fact that it’s winter.

Well, after turning various shades of green I did manage to get him cleaned up. My one consolation is that he cannot possibly do another one of those again today….

Can he????