Jonah makes jokes.
Sometimes, it’s a joke only he gets.
Like the other night when he was eating his hummus for dinner and he would take a bite and then he’d say “hummus” and then he’d say this string of syllables. Jibberish? I have no idea. But the string stayed consistent each time — and then he would laugh hysterically. The fact that I couldn’t understand what he was saying may have been part of it?
Clearly, it was an inside joke.
He has this relatively new habit of getting us to fill in the blanks. It’s like he has taken all the pointing and quizzing that we’ve been doing with him — in that way that you do with toddlers learning to speak? What’s this? What does the lion say? etc. — for the last year (my lord, he’s been talking for a year!!!???) and has turned it around on us. Maybe not to be capricious but possibly because he thinks, this is how one makes conversation? He points at a picture of an animal and says to us, “This is a… what?” “A cow says… what?”
So, on Sunday, we’re hanging out in the bathroom as we do, with him on the potty and me seated nearby as potty companion and he says, “A bulldozer scoops… what?” and I answer, “A bulldozer scoops sand.” And he says, “Yeah.” And then we do it again, “A bulldozer scoops, what?” And I answer, “A bulldozer scoops dirt.”
He keeps asking and I keep answering. But after dirt, sand, rocks, I start to get bored. So I fill in other things. “Elephants.” “Yeah.” “Cupcakes.” “Yeah.” He keeps asking, and keeping a straight face, but as I keep going with the absurd responses, he starts cracking up, hysterically. “A bulldozer scoops… what?” He nearly toppled off the potty laughing. It’s a good joke.
Yes, I suppose you could say it was my joke, but I truly feel it was a collaboration.
This evening, after Jonah’s bath, which Scott presided over, Jonah requested in the sweetest voice to “sit on the bed with mom-meee for a little whi-yull.” A break in the bedtime routine, but how could I resist? I pulled him up onto the bed with me.
I’m lying down, he’s scooching his butt up against my rib cage, back tall. And then he turns around and starts crawling all over me and we’re wrestling but somehow he settles down and I’m still lying on the bed and now he’s also lying down, perpendicular to me, with his head on my belly, looking up at me, and at the wall.
“There are STARS, onthe WALLLLL,” he says, indicating our strings of Ikea gold star twinkle lights.
“And uh pic-chure ofaaah CAT, anduhhhh BIRD…” he’s describing a framed piece of artwork that is also on that wall, and I’m repeating back each declaration “yes, there’s a CAT, and a BIRD…”
He continues, “And uhhh BABY eatingggg WATERMELONNN.” He pauses, “It’s ahhhh WATERMELON BAy-BEEE.”
He smiles.
So it is.
As a side note, the baby in the collage isn’t actually eating anything at all, but it has a wide, pink cherubic face, and the way it is smiling, the precise width of its fists below its face, the curve of its belly, from a distance it does kind of look like it’s biting into a slice of watermelon.