Wednesday, March 6, 2013: That's what he said

There are some things that Gavin says that one day he'll say "correctly" and my heart will break a little bit. Like how when he was first starting to talk and he called me "Dirt." I loved it. The first time he called me "Mama D" I was a little crestfallen. I've come up with a list of some of his current Gavinisms:

• "Mazagine." He really likes to get those free auto trader guides that probably no one with an Internet connection looks at anymore. He calls them his car mazagines. His interest in them once he has them is minimal though. I think he mostly likes opening the paper boxes outside of CVS. 
• "Affinity," though he's leaning toward infinity now. He is very interested in the concept of infinity. A kid at school told him it was the biggest number and he definitely believes that bigger is better. So much so, in fact, that he tries to make infinity bigger by tacking on the biggest numbers he knows. For example, the other day in the car he told Stacy that he loved her "more than infinity one hundred."
• "Think so" instead of think. As in, "I think so Norm is going to play soccer." Norm is our neighbor and Gavin enjoys tracking his comings and goings. Norm once informed Gavin that he was leaving to go play soccer and now that's pretty much the only thing Gavin thinks Norm does.
• "Yawl pie," you know, "where the speed comes out." If you're confused, you can imagine how I felt until I realized he was trying to say "exhaust pipe." He's actually pretty good at saying it now, but every now and again he gets tripped up. And I love that he thinks the exhaust pipe releases speed. He also believes that the numbers on the side of race cars indicates how fast they can go.
• "Tell me a water tower story." When we're in the car Gavin often requests that we tell him stories -- ones that we make up on the spot. It's a lot of pressure. It started with asking for a ghost story every time we passed a cemetery. And then one day Stacy told him a story about a water tower. (I should mention that my stories are in English, hers are in Spanish). I don't know what prompted this, but now every time we pass a water tower you can put money on Gavin requesting something from the water tower story genre. A genre Stacy and I are inventing, apparently. At first the stories had to do with people needing water and the water tower not working and someone coming to fix it so people could take baths and wash dishes again. A variation of that broken tower story takes place in a zoo since the Detroit Zoo water tower is one we pass a lot. But that story got boring after awhile (for the story tellers, anyway), and I've diversified telling stories of water towers filled with fish, lemonade, apple cider, and even soft serve ice cream. The last water tower story I told the water tower wasn't a water tower at all but a secret space station that launched a rocket ship.  
• "There's a concert coming on." Gavin is quite the littler performer and when the mood strikes him he likes to sing and play his guitar or drums. When he wants an audience he announces, "There's a concert coming on!" just like when people used to watch TV in the days before DVRs and someone would get up to go to the bathroom during the commercial break and need to be notified immediately when the show was back on because by god you were going to miss something otherwise and the only other way to see the episode again would be to hope for reruns in the summer. 
• "Kids and girls," a.k.a. boys and girls. I'm not entirely sure why he thinks "kids" are only boys, but it is probably related to the fact that he is a kid and a boy and that's just how it works in his brain. Also maybe because he's a young sexist in training. 
• Jek ski instead of jet ski. This is largely a mispronunciation rather than a misunderstanding. He knows about jet skis, of course, from watching Eastbound & Down. 
• "Paper toilet." No one Gavin speaks English with says "paper toilet" instead of toilet paper. And yet this term adorably persists. He does not even seem to be aware that is not how other people say it in English. It's a translation he's cobbled out of the Spanish papel higiénico.

Speaking of Spanish, as I have mentioned, Gavin goes to a Spanish immersion preschool. Today he brought home a painting of a horse (yesterday he did a painting of a cow. He is a very thorough painter, covering every inch of a picture. He pained the entire cow black to the point where if it didn't say la vaca underneath I wouldn't have known what it was. I asked him if it was a picture of a cow at night and he liked that idea). I said to Gavin, "Oh, today you painted a caballo." And he looked at me with a bit of amazement and said, "You know that word!" And I said that, yes, I did and that I learned it from him. And he said, "This is your Spanish school and I am your teacher." He's right. The Spanish I have learned in the past three years is due to listening to Stacy and Gavin talk to each other and asking a lot of questions. I usually get the gist of their conversations even if I couldn't translate it directly for you. Some words I know especially well because even before Spanish was being bandied about our house Gavin had a hand-me-down Baby Einstein exersaucer when he was little that had buttons with pictures of animals on them. When pressed a voice would say the animal's name in English, then Spanish, and then make the animal's sound. There was cow (vaca), lion (león), dog (perro), cat (gato), and duck (pato), which is the animal I remember most clearly because that button was in the center and so it got pressed a lot. I still sometimes get "Duck, pato, quack quack" said in the weirdly child-like voice of the exersaucer stuck in my head at random moments.