Why?

Why do I ask so many questions? Why am I always asking why? Why do you want to know?

Suppose you spent two long years immersed in a world in which you couldn’t understand anyone around you. Now suppose that you are fully reliant on those same people for your most basic of needs. Learning to communicate would be your top priority. And once you had developed the rudimentary means to do that, those two years of repressed questions would erupt like a long dormant volcano. So yes, I ask a lot of questions. But the world is a very complicated place, with many levels of nuance and distinct social norms. To which, please expect me to continue to bombard everyone with answering distance within everything that I could possibly want to know. Because hey, why shouldn’t I?

Sleeping Habits of a Young Hamilton

I am a great sleeper. Not to brag, but I lay down for my nap and bedtime by myself and go to sleep on my own. I am able to do this no matter what else is going on around me. Take last weekend as an example, Mommy put me in bed while Daddy and Papi where hammering, sawing, drilling and making all kinds of noise right outside my window. I just ignored it all and promptly passed out. No matter the atmosphere I tend to move around a great deal in my sleep. Here are so pictures mommy took today during nap time.

Lub oo

A day doesn’t go by where I am not amused by the shocked faces of my parents and grandparents when I utter a new word. It is funny to watch them when I call their names when they walk in the room or shout bye and lub-oo when it is time for jammas. I can now say the names of many of the things in my room, around the house and out in the world. It is much easier to make them understand what I want, now that I can tell them. I let them know that I prefer to have the yogurt drink Keepur with my breakfast rather than juss, that I want to have a beam or a cookay rather than dinner, how much I would like to go see the copie take off and land, and particularly to stob it when they are trying to rearrange my lines of cars or steal bites of my dinner.

As my vocabulary increases I can also share with them what I see, hear and feel. I can tell Daddy when he gets home from work that I saw the copie land and fly, that I told them bye and that it was lello even though it was really red and blue. I can tell Papi that I want him to get the car with the mote or Bam-ma to get out the paints. Soon I will be talking in complete sentences and they will never get me to be quiet.

Family

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family. This is a good thing, because I have a lot of family. They stretch to both coasts of the United States, down into the Caribbean and all the over to parts of Europe. Some are within driving distance and some would require two or three plane flights just to hug hello. All of this is a benefit as home is where you are always welcome. And with my family spread out over half of the Northern Hemisphere, I have a lot of places that I can feel loved. The only downside is that I do not get to see some people in my family as often as I would like. To them, all I can offer is my distant love and a open invitation to come and visit. Because, after all, my home is where you are always welcome too.

No I do not want to say yes. No I do not want to say no. No I do not want to give you my opinion, no I do not want to not give you my opinion and no I do not want to be negative. I just want to say no. No to you, no to everything and no to me. No. No. No.

Unless you want to give me a cookie.

I Have the Power!

Last night I had trouble staying asleep. So after a while of trying, we decided to start over and turned the light on. I was still pretty worked up, so I decided to play with my toys for a bit until I calmed down. During that time Mom went for ice cream and Dad stayed to play with me. I did everything that I could to calm down. I rode my zebra, played with blocks, jumped into my ball pit and finally settled in on rolling one of my push toys back and forth across the floor.

All of this Dad seemed to approve of. So much so that he had gone to just lying on his back in the middle of the room. And it was from there that I heard his say, "NO!" as I ran my push toy across the wall and not the floor. Sure it's wood and heavy so it probably would have made marks, but I wasn't thinking about that at 11:30pm. Sometime during the end of his "NO!" I decided to spin around to show him that I was stopping, except I slipped. I must have hit the edge of the carpet, a wind must have caught me, or we could have had a small earthquake - I can't be too sure.

What happened next was both hilarious and sad. As I spun I took the push toy with me and as I fell with the toy, the weight of all of that wood and metal came full force around over my head and directly down on Dad. Now here is the funny part: Dad made a sound that I can only explain as the sound you would hear from a sick Yak getting kicked in the butt. I would say that he screamed like a girl, but I don't know of any female, outside of pregnant rhinoceroses, that could sound like that. So as he curled into a ball trying to repress words that he said he would teach me when I turn five, I realized that this whole incident had a down side: I didn't get it on film.

The Power of No

Not being able to fully articulate the exact verbiage that I would like to express during any particular situation, I’ve had to resort to allowing others to guess the exact desire in which I am having a trouble conveying. Thus I have found that the word "no", said ad nauseam, is my new modus operandi. It is not that I wish to be this obstinate; I just don’t have choice in the matter.