Thursday, May 31, 2012

Wait a minute Mr. Postman

There seems to be an alarming rate of illiteracy among the mail delivery people that service our neighbourhood. Like most moms, I have a note posted on my door. It reads, "please do not ring the bell or knock... Baby sleeping.


Perhaps it should read, "make any noise and I'll castrate you", for all the respect my little plea is getting these days. And yes, it should be noted the all the offenders are male. Because no self-respecting female would incur the wrath of a mother whose baby was awoken by their inability to follow instructions.


USPS, FedEx, UPS... All the biggies are hiring idiots that must have flunked out of kindergarten, because two days is a row, Mattias has been woken early by their stupidity. My adorable son usually takes a 3 hour nap in the afternoon. Which he needs, or else he turns into something decidedly... Less adorable.

It's actually not the bell itself that wakes him up, but our dog's reaction to the bell. She sounds the alarm like nobody's business, and while I appreciate that in most cases, this is not one of them.

I came very close to chasing the mailman down today to kick him in the... Errr, give him a piece of what is left of my mind, but he was already in his truck and starting to drive away. The thought of running after his truck crossed my mind, but this neighbourhood is just not ready for that kind of crazy.

The only non-offending company is a little rinky-dink delivery service that sometimes brings me my Amazon shipments. He never rings the bell. The first time he ever delivered a package, I was sitting in my front room and saw through the window that he actually took the time to read my note and follow the instructions. I figure if he can do it, why can't the rest of them?

When I was recounting the story to my next-door neighbour, and I told her the part about chasing after the mailman, she told me, "I would have liked to see that."

She might just get her wish, if the illiteraci keep it up.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Mattias-isms... the weird ones

When we decided that Fred would only speak to our kids in Portuguese, many people were concerned that it would delay our kids, language-wise.  The answer was a resounding "no", seeing how Elise said her first word at the age of 7 months and never looked back.  I mean, the girl spoke in complete sentences before she turned two.

She has not stopped talking since.

Now with Mattias, it's been different.  He also said his first word at the age of 7 months, but we noticed he was more than happy to just point at things and grunt.  We chalked this up to the fact that; a) he is a guy, and b) his big sister makes up for his apparent mute-ness.

But lately all that has changed and he now talks up a storm.  Except we have no idea what the crap he is saying because the little man has his own language and apparently I am the lone translator.  Here are a couple of his gems:

agua-wa - water

Poom - shoes

Glngh-glngh (very hard to write phonetically) - Elise (no, I don't know why)

Baba - iPad

Apoom - fork

Acune - music. 

Pa - truck

Begungh - bird

Gungh -  Any number of letter of the alphabet.  When I read books with either of these, he'll point to the letter or number and say, "Gungh!"  For every one.  The funny thing is when he watches Wheel of Fortune with Elise (she loves that show), he will actually yell out letters, "Ah!", "Ohh!", "Eeee!", "Mmmm!"  Then he claps for himself.

I love this boy!