The kid and I went to the store this afternoon to stock up on Diet Coke, but the shelves were bare. Apparently the Coke truck hadn't turned up yet, and so Amadou, the store manager, apologized and offered us a raincheck.
So I told the kid how the truck didn't come and so she started saying "No Coke for Amadou" all the way home.
And just now, when we started talking about our day with Mommy after dinner, she started singing and dancing around: "No Coke for A-ma-DOU. No Coke for A-ma-DOU." Now she won't stop; she's beating the microwave in time with a pair of sticks.
Meanwhile, I'm getting afraid to take her back to the store tomorrow, in case she freaks him out with her voodoo chants.
But my biggest fear is that we've been neglecting or even stifling her innate musical genius; the kid has been a music fan since like day 60.
Oooh, I love stories about the kid! More stories about the kid!
A current Lucas favorite is that everywhere we go is "magasin [store] de something or other" Which makes perfect sense when discussing the book store or the clothing store but the three that make me laugh out loud are "magasin de popoudre" [baby powder store, IE the pharmacy], "magasin de Buddha" [a store that sells stuff from Thailand, including Buddha statues] and my fav "magasin de bhaji" [the indian restaurant we go to].
Remember that for when you start a band. I can see the ironic t-shirts already.
Maybe Off Topic, but why in hell a kid needs to drink DIET Coke? Have you checked the consequences of the poison called Aspartame?
Google would provide you with dozens of thousands of papers and articles about this chemical, just to begin with:
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/
http://www.dorway.com/badnews.html
[yes, I know all about Aspartame, and yes, Donald Rumsfeld is at the dark, evil center of the whole problem. But the Diet Coke is for me to poison MYSELF, not to poison the kid. -ed.]
Asparteme includes a naturally-occurring amino acid which is very dangerous to those with a genetic intolerance to it -- phenylketonuria. At least here in Massachusetts, all babies are tested for this at birth, and so you'd know if your child had this disorder.
It's also been linked in reputable studies to a slightly increased risk of cancer in women, but not in men. It's possible that there are other adverse effects, but that's possible with anything, and aspartame has in fact been subject to a lot of studies and to decades of actual use by millions -- with no obvious, dramatic horrible outcome. In fact, without *any* detectible outcome, horrible or not.
I still think the stuff tastes nasty, though.
[there's the whole, "it turns into formaldehyde" thing, which I'm counting on to help preserve my corpse in a glass-topped coffin so that all my followers can come and pay their respects for decades after I'm gone. Oh wait, that's Mao. -ed.],