Here she is with Bob the Blanket, so named because Liza pronounces "blanket" as "bahhhhh". Come to think of it, she pronounces most things as "bahhhhh." It's like living on a sheep farm around here some days.

Today at the library she kept saying "bahhhhh" and pointing to the door to the room where babytime was being held. "You already have your blanket," I said, since she was clutching Bob in the hand that wasn't pointing. Sometimes she forgets, you know, and when you point out that she already has what she's asking for, she acts like it just magically appeared there or something. Anyway, she kept saying the same thing, and so I looked around for other things that she says the same way. "Do you want the ball, sweetie?" Swat ... "Bahhhhhh!" "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you want."

Finally, after half a dozen rounds of "guess which thing she's trying to ask for," it dawns on me that when we were walking in, I told her we would go see our friends at babytime, then we would go see the parakeets over by the copy machine. "Do you want to see the birds?" "Bahh! Bahh! Bah!!" No change in pronunciation, but she's jumping up and down, trying to reach the door handle. I grabbed our stuff and opened the door for her, and she took off at full speed, stomping everything in her path with her jingly biker boots, making a beeline directly for the parakeets. Mom's Translation Service - we may not be fast, but we get it right eventually.

And, lest you think that my daughter has a speech impediment as well as a host of physical delays, let me just tell you that the other day my daughter said "river" after only hearing it twice. And she said it with the "ver," not some toddler-ized version of it. So the kid can talk when she wants to ... I think she's just too lazy to get out more than Bahhhhh except in special circumstances.

If you could take a biological culture from Bob, you'd find he has a germ population at least has high as the human population in the US, possibly higher, thanks to the cold Liza's currently sniffling and hacking her way through. Her nose has been running like a faucet, and since kleenex are apparently evil, it's easier to just let her wipe her nose on Bob. We do, after all, have four of them, and so far she doesn't seem to notice when I swap the stanky one for a clean one, even when I do it in plain sight. There's also enough yogurt and chocolate on today's Bob to sustain Liza for at least a day or two if there's some sort of food shortage, and I'm fairly sure I could knit a nice hat out of the cat hair it's picked up since I last swapped blankies after preschool on Monday. At least it hasn't made a trip through the maple syrup (yet).

On a side note, every time I see Liza toting around her little half-sized blanket, which is about the size of a hand towel, I get all misty-eyed thinking about Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and towels in general. Jason and I were supposed to be going to see the opening night of the (relatively crappy) new movie version of Hitchhiker's on the day when I was induced and had Liza, so we didn't get to see it until it came out on dvd like 6 months later. If you aren't familiar with Hitchhiker's lore and the exalted place held by the towel, here's an excerpt from the book, as related on http://www.towelday.kojv.net/, which explains some of it:

To quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

One of the characters in the book actually has one corner of his towel soaked in a nutrient solution as emergency rations, which is why I always think of it when Liza is smearing barbecue sauce all over it. For, you see, the character also had a spot of barbecue sauce on his towel, to get rid of the taste of the nutrient solution. Ah, Douglas Adams, how I miss you. I'm adding Towel Day to my calendar as we speak.

Ahem. Getting back to real life. The cold doesn't seem to slow Liza down much during the day, but it's been a pain in the butt to get her to bed the last two nights. I've had to rock her to sleep both nights, restraining her to keep her from emptying the bookshelf next to the chair for the fifth time each night; and to keep her hands out of my mouth, nose, ears, eyes, hair; and to keep her from hitting me; and tonight I got to threaten to just leave her there if she bit me one more time. I know she's sick, and I know she's teething, but this just isn't cool. I mean, I've got the same cold she does, and nobody rocks me to sleep when I've got postnasal drip so bad I have to sleep propped up at a 45 degree angle in bed.

And whatever happened to postnasal drip as a symptom? When I was a kid, I distinctly remember one of the types of Triaminic that I used to take listed postnasal drip as one of the symptoms it treated. Now all I see is "cough due to minor throat and bronchial irritation." Yeah, that's one way to describe it. Another way is "there's crap dripping down the back of my throat and making me wake up gagging and gasping for air." See, I'd know which medicine to take if that was listed as one of the symptoms. Annnddd ... thanks to the wonders of google, here's more than you ever really wanted to know about postnasal drip.

On a more pleasant subject, how cute is my daughter?

Oh, so very cute. When she's not trying to eat holly berries (yeah, I know they're poisonous), or bite me, or shove her entire hand up one of my nostrils. Some days, cute is the only thing that saves her. That, and the fact that if she's gone, who will I dress up in the biker boots and monkey butt pants?