I can remember one day in the fall of 2004 when Allie was one. My mom told her to go put her diaper in the garbage, so she did. I was amazed, because that was the first time I knew she could understand English.
In November of 2004, when she was sixteen months, there were only a few words she could say. I think she attempted to say "Xiang-an," the Chinese name of my nephew Preston, but she later only would say "Baby." She could say "turkey" because she loved the inflatable turkey in our yard. Shrek 2 came out that month, and she grew to really like the movie, calling it "Shh."
The following March, I remember her coming into my room on Good Friday, after we had just gotten Easter gifts. She brought Preston's new toy, which had a picture of a dog on it, and said, "Woof!" That was the first time we knew she knew what a dog said.
She learned that our cat's name was Jenny, so she learned that word, only she pronounced it "Genn," with the g hard as in get and girl. My mom thought she was actually saying "kitten," but I'm not sure. She was good at the linguistic principle of overextension, which is using one word to refer to more things than it means. "Genn" was her word for any cat or cat-like animal. Shrek 2 became known as Genn, because of the Puss in Boots character. (She called Monsters Inc. "Boo" and The Incredibles "Bob" and sometimes "Bob, Dash, Baby.") I remember a trip from Yellowstone when Allie was about two in which we stopped at a rest stop for lunch. There was a squirrel by our table, and when we left, Allie said, "Bye Genn!" On that same trip, she wanted to watch The Incredibles and said, "I miss Bob." That was only the second time we had heard her say "I miss [something]"; the previous time had been one Sunday when she said, "I miss Mom."
For her birthday when she turned two, she got some fake food. She called a fake cookie "cake." But that overextension didn't last long; her go-to dessert word became "pie." At that same time she called all fruits "apples," and she often would request a tomato, calling it an apple. (She requested tomatoes because they look much sweeter than they are.) She later added "bunny" to her vocabulary, which replaced "Genn" as the go-to word for small mammals. She called squirrels bunnies, and she had some Minnie Mouse sandals that she would refer to as bunnies.
One day that same summer (2005), we were looking at pictures and she started calling everyone by name. At that point she had learned to call my dad Pop; I'm not sure why. She kept calling Ya-ping "Gawgo." It was really funny. We don't know where that came from, but the name stuck. After that, my mom and I were the only ones who didn't have a name from her. She finally started saying Mark, so Grams was the last name she had to learn. Of course, she didn't say her r's, so "Mark" was more like "Mawk." Once I walked into a room and my sister said, "It's Mawk," and Allie said, "No, it's Mawk." She knew my name wasn't Mawk, even if she couldn't say it right. On my birthday in 2005, someone said, "It's the birthday boy!" and she said, "No, it's Mawk."
She used to talk about all of our cars, but she would say it as "ky" (rhymes with "guy"). She would say, "Pop's ky, Mommy ky," and so on.
At the Halloween season in 2005, she became terrified by many Halloween things, even simple things like jack-o-lanterns. As the season progressed, she became a little more tolerant. She would say, "I not scary," meaning she wasn't scared. Once she said, "Pumpkins aren't scary."
In introduced her to Charlie Brown, which she called "Sally and Brown"--although looking back I'm not sure if she was actually saying "Sally and" or if that was her attempt at saying "Charlie."
My sister for some reason introduced Allie to Disney Princesses, and she grew to love them. In October 2005, Cinderella was released on DVD. We put the DVD in and watched the trailers. Allie identified Cinderella as "Wa-wee." Our best guess was that was an attempt to say "Relly," as in "Cinderelly."
At some point that year, my sister began buying bags of cheese sticks that had two flavors, a white one that was Monterey jack, and a yellow one that was cheddar. We would refer to these as white cheese and yellow cheese. Then Allie converted white cheese to Snow White cheese. And then since she had Snow White cheese, the yellow cheese became Belle cheese. I didn't like those cheese sticks; I preferred mozzarella string cheese, so whenever we got regular string cheese, those were called Mark cheese. These cheese names stuck for a really long time. Eventually my sister quit buying the yellow and white cheese sticks and just bought regular string cheese. That was still called Mark cheese, even though there was no other cheese to distinguish it from.
In November 2005, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out. That was another movie Allie liked, but it led her to pick up the word "stupid," as Mike Teavee would say, "It's stupid!" In that movie, Willy Wonka once said, "Scaredy cat," and Allie would combine two words she learned in the movie and say "Stupid cat!" She would call Willy Wonka a girl.
Once when she was two and a half, we had a rotisserie chicken, and she kept calling it a "bum."
At some point when she was two, she picked up a habit of assigning characters to a member of the family. I can remember doing this some as a kid of about 5, but only when I was watching movies. Allie took it to the extreme. Near my high school was a car lot with an inflatable witch and an inflatable gorilla. She said the witch was her (because she had been a witch for Halloween) and the gorilla was Preston. In January 2006, we went to Target and bought Corpse Bride. She looked at the DVD and said that she was the Corpse Bride and Preston was Victor, and Pops was the skeleton dog. Around that time, I got the second season of Bewitched on DVD. She did similar things on that DVD. There was a picture of Darrin and Samantha and their new baby--that was David and Gawgo and Baby. There was a picture of Darrin as a werewolf--that was me. And the little animated Samantha was Allie, since she usually made any witch her. (She also kept saying that the animated Samantha was Sleeping Beauty.)
However, the most common and consistent name assignments were with Disney Princesses. She had these down pat. She was Belle and Preston was Beast, my mom and dad were Cinderella and her prince, Gawgo and David were Ariel and Eric, Susanne and I were Sleeping Beauty and Prince Phillip, and our aunt Sue was Snow White. Our cousin Peter was the huntsman sent to kill Snow White. When she would read Princess books, she would substitute family names. All of her replacement names sometimes led to her saying some funny things. Once she was watching Beauty and the Beast and said, "Mom! It's the scary Preston!" Once she said, "Peter tried to kill Sue!"
In 2006, I wrote a blog post about her fascination with "naughty words."
In the spring of 2006, she started calling my mom "Grandmamother" (pronounced "Grammamudder").
Around the summer of 2006, she picked up a lot of words and phrases from movies. All of a sudden she began calling me "Crazy woof" (wolf), and we didn't know why. Then one day I was watching Hoodwinked! with her, and heard Red say, "You crazy wolf!" One summer morning she came into my room and said, "Get up Sully!"--quoting a line directly from Monsters Inc. Once she said something about "a smile like a sick pumpkin"--a line from A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Once I heard her say, "You mean old thing!" facetiously, a line from Cinderella.
She would also memorize words from her princess books; you could read to her and stop and she would fill in the words. Once she said to me, "Did you like looking for treasures when you were a little mermaid?" That was shortly after she said to me, "Bird seed is so gross. I tried it once when I was a little bird, and it was yucky."
Once we were driving through a cemetery, and Allie looked out the window and said, "Oh my gosh! They're darling!"
That summer Ya-ping's sister Shu-hua came for a visit, and Allie began calling her her best friend.
This summer she pronounced my cousin Jesse's name as "Jeshy."
That summer we went camping at Moosehorn lake. One day we drove to see a waterfall with my uncle John and his kids. Allie fell asleep in the car, and when we got there, everyone got out to look at the waterfall. My mom was staying in the car with Allie. After everyone had walked off, I noticed that Allie had woken up, so I looked in at her. She said to me, "Go look at that faterwall!" Another time on this trip, I was watching her walk around. She didn't like my supervision, so she kept saying to me, "No, Prince Biwip [Phillip]!"
In August or September of 2006, a Halloween costume catalog came in the mail, and Allie became obsessed with Halloween costumes. She knew all the costumes in the catalog, and she had decided what all of us were going to be for Halloween. I think I was going to be a ghost. I remember being in the backyard with her one day, discussing the costume situation. I was asking her what people should be for Halloween. I think she said my dad was going to be a turkey. After I had gone through everyone in the family, she said, "What about my best friend Shu-ha?" So I asked her what she should be. She saw the garbage can in the backyard and said, "A crash tan!"
Whereas she had been terrified of Halloween in 2005, she loved it in 2006. She would always insist on driving past houses with lots of decorations. One had a giant spider, so she called that house the spider house. The Loveridges had an inflatable Frankenstein, which she called "Stankenfrein." Once this inflatable was not properly inflated, so for a long time afterwards she would tell us about how the "Stankenfrein was on the ground." She called skeletons "skilligans," probably on analogy with Gilligan (since Quin used to watch that when he visited).
On September 17, 2006, we visited my aunt's house and she fell off the couch and hurt her arm. Then we went back on October 29, and she said that she was going to fall off the couch and hurt her arm. On our way home that day, she started calling me Piggy. She even said, "Oink oink!"
At that same time, she told me that Santa Claus was going to go to Target to get her toys.
This was around the same time she started calling Willy Wonka "Winky Wonka."
One fall Saturday, I took her outside and played with her in the leaves. She got a leaf stuck to her hair near her eye. She said it made her a pirate. Then she said it made her look like an Indian.
A day or two after Halloween, the Thompsons were at our house, and Allie told Sue, "My mouth's having issues," referring to the rotting face of her jack-o-lantern.
At Christmastime in 2006, she became interested in nativities, which she called "antivities." She called Joseph "Jophes." She would play with nativities like action figures. Once we watched a video of the nativity, and she got the idea that they were giving a baby blessing, and would often incorporate this idea into her playing. Once when she was playing with a particular nativity, I told her, "They're not really giving a baby blessing." So she asked for the box. She said, "It says, 'They give the baby's blessing.'" (The box, in fact, said no such thing.)
Around this time we began to teach her the names of family members. She began to refer to her mom as "Susanne Arena" (her middle name is Sarena) and she would sometimes refer to my dad as Ricky or Rick. She once went to a party with family members of her mom's boyfriend. She later told us that she had told some girls there that Rick's mom had died. I remember thinking how funny it must have been to have this little three-year-old telling these girls about how someone they didn't even know had his mother die!
I remember a day in January 2007 when she named her stuffed animals Allie and Mr. Brucey (Bruce was the name of the dog of her mom's boyfriend). Another night she was watching a Princess Sing-Along and said, "Is this a Valentimes show? 'Cause it has hearts in it?"
One day in February or March the Thompsons were at our house. Quin called her a silly goose. She retorted, "Silly duck!"
My mom got a calling as Activity Days leader, and Allie loved those girls. She called them "antivity girls."
For spring break in 2007, we went to Nashville, and Susanne and Allie took a plane there. I asked Allie how she liked the plane. She said, "It was a little fast."
Then on Easter Sunday, I tended her. I tried to tell her the true meaning of Easter, but she wouldn't have any discussion of death: "I don't want you to die, because then you won't live with us anymore!"
That spring she saw a picture of a city and called it New York. (It was actually either Las Vegas or Salt Lake.) (Maybe this actually happened the year before--I can't remember.)
One day in May, my cousin Jesse came for a visit. She said to him, "You table! You chair!" Jesse found that really funny.
She had a phase where she began words with "bee." Banana was "beenana," pajamas was "beejamas," and Fiona on Shrek was "Beefonia." (Her interest in Shrek was rekindled when Shrek the Third came out.) She also called marshmallows "smarshmallows."
Memorial Day weekend 2007, we went and saw the new baby of my cousin-in-law Kalia. The baby was wearing a bow, and Allie said, "Just like Baby Shrek!" Allie also said, "Our baby walks." The "our baby" she was referring to was Preston, who was two and a half. I found it funny she called him "our baby," especially since she herself wasn't even four yet.
Then came the summer of 2007, when I was working at Walmart, working in the nursery, and getting ready for a mission. Allie became really funny that summer as she was turning four.
I was once filling out a job application. I asked my mom and sister what I should put on a certain line, and they said, "None." Allie said, "The Flying Nun?" In August that summer, she was playing with her mom, and randomly blurted out "Flying Nun" and "Surfer Buddy!"
There was once a sign on a fence that said "Welcome Home Elder D!" My mom told her what it said, and said that they could make one for me when I got home that said "Welcome Home Elder Mark." Allie had not heard the word "Elder," so she understood "Elder D" as "Letter D," which really does make sense. For the next few years she kept saying that she was going to make a sign that said "Welcome Home Letter Mark." I was quite sad when I got home and the sign said "Elder Mark"--apparently the six-year-old Allie insisted on "elder," even though my mom and sister wanted it to say "letter."
In 2007 she would sometimes call me a name: "You ball-head baby!" We didn't know where that came from. Once when she called me that, my mom reproved her, and she seemed kind of taken aback that she had been reproved: "I just called him a ball-head baby." Then one day she was watching some pre-teen movie, and I found out that's where she got the insult, although I think the movie actually said "bottle-head baby."
That summer, my aunt started the divorce process and kicked her husband out of the house. That apparently inspired Allie to tell me I needed to move out if she didn't like something I did. The first time she did this, she said to me, "Your mom will kick you out, and you'll have to go live by Uncle Wayne!" She did this often, and would sometimes say, "Pack up your stuff and go!" Once she said, "Remember when you broke your leg when you were a little boy? That's why you're moving out!" I wasn't sure why that merited moving out. Once she said "You'll have to come live by us!" since she and her mom had just moved out. Then came the Sunday that fall when she told me to move out, so I began walking out. She said to me, "Don't forget your stuff!" I said, "I have everything I need," and I walked out. Apparently she said to my mom, "He didn't have to leave." She looked out the window and saw me standing in the driveway, so she invited me back in. For weeks she would randomly apologize: "I'm sorry I made you move out, Mark."
But although she no longer told me to move out, she continued to do other threats. On General Conference Sunday, she said to me, "You can't go to nursery anymore! You have to go to Sunday School with your mom and dad!" One day we went to the new Walmart in Centerville. On our way in, she told me about a Spongebob episode she had watched, and said, "Patrick said to Spongebob, 'We're gonna go in a can!'" She didn't want to ride in the cart, so we told her that she could walk around, but if she walked away, she would have to go in the cart again. Well, at one point I found she had wandered off into another aisle, so I picked her up and put her back in the cart. She didn't like that, so she said, "You're gonna go in a can, just like Spongebob and Patrick!"
One Sunday, my mom told her that her mom had packed two dresses. Allie said, "Why did she do that? She's such a retarded sauce!" I figured out that was a misunderstanding of Spongebob's interjection "Tartar sauce!"
Once she was at our house, and she said to her mom, "Your belly's getting big. I think you're going to have a girl!" Susanne said, "Nope, no baby. I'm just fat." At which point Allie pointed to my mom and me and said, "Oh, just like her and him?" My sister took her up to leave. My dad hadn't been in the room (and therefore hadn't heard the conversation), but she called out to him, "Your belly's sure getting big, Pops!" Another time that fall we were at their apartment and a weight-loss commercial came on. Allie said, "Look, Grandma, her belly's as big as yours!" Susanne said, "Allie, that's really not nice." To which Allie said, quite innocently, "I didn't say fat."
Then I left on my mission. I didn't get to talk to Allie during those two years, of course. But I do remember one email she dictated to me in which she said, "I promise," but it didn't make any sense. I talked to her on Christmas 2008. I told her she sounded so big, and she said, "I know, because I'm five." She also told me that she had seen a thing on the news about a Santa Claus tracker, and said, "It kind of freaked me out." On Mother's Day 2009, I talked to her and said, "I can't believe you are five!" She corrected me: "Five and a half."
Then I came home from my mission. On the car ride home, she told me that Preston would wake up with a frowny face. One day that month she said, "I aren't." Then she corrected herself, "I amn't." One day we talked about having family home evening, and she said "hamly foam evening." On December 29, my sister was trying to get her to eat a pork sandwich leftover from my homecoming. Allie refused and said, "My belly doesn't like meat on Tuesdays!"
On Groundhog Day in 2010, my family came down because my car needed to be towed. I was in my Intro to English Language class, and I needed to observe Allie linguistically. I heard her say, "Do you renember that?" She said her favorite February holidays were "Valentimes and Groundog Day."
The Saturday before Memorial Day that year, my parents picked me up in Provo and we drove down to Fillmore. Allie had a stack of movies she was watching, one of which was Mamma Mia! I told Allie I didn't want to watch it, since I don't know of any PG-13 movies that fit my standards. After agreeing to watch something else, Allie told me that I could watch it because it had boys in it. She also told me I could watch her Barbie Princess and the Pauper movie because it had boys in it too.
Fall 2010 I lived at home. She would say "gooder" instead of "better." She would also say "care" instead of "matter." Once I challenged her on this, and she got quite defensive: "It doesn't care what you say!" She would even say "news" instead of "use," a relic from her toddler days.
In June 2011, we were meeting my uncle John and his family (who live in Delta) at the aquarium. Allie asked, "Will their license plate say Utah or Delta?"
On New Year's Eve that year, she was playing with Preston with some sticky dart things that stick to the wall. She caught one as it fell off the wall and said, "Caught red handed!"
She went through a time where she would use "awkward" to mean "weird," and she would use "creepy" all over the place. It usually meant "weird" as well, but it was different than "awkward."
She has often had a habit of saying "Yeah" or "I know" when you tell her something--even if you're answering a question she asked.
Well, that's all I can think of at the moment, but I know there have been lots of other funny things she's said!
Love this one! I can't believe you remember all this. It is great to revisit those days of long ago and have them written so I can "remember" them later, too.
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