Strings and Things

My son loves string.


I’ve already posted about his delight at finding a loose string on the hotel comforter that was long enough to use. He was so excited to get a string that he could tie it to his machin and use to pull that around. It only took one look at my pajamas for him to figure out that the ribbons threaded through the neck and leg openings were long enough for him to use. By the end of the week, they’d all been removed and fashioned into one delightful string for pulling his machin.

You can see from these pictures that you can do all sorts of fun things once your machin has a string:

Unfortunately, Malot doesn’t yet know that not all string-like things are created equally.

He was fascinated by our laptop. The Creole phrase he uses to describe the computer means “the machine that sings”. When he wanted to look at the laptop again, he’d ask if he could play with "the machine that sings to him".

I thought it would be fun for him to see what headphones do. I knew he’d never seen such at thing in his short life:

You can see the wonder on his face. He was completely enthralled with them.






For about 2 minutes.



That’s about how long it took for Malot to realize that headphones look remarkably like string. Very awesome string!

He realized that headphones are essentially three strings. Or at least they would be if only he could convince Momma to cut them for him. People wonder how we knew what he was saying since he only speaks Creole and we only speak English and I can’t really explain it. You just know some things. We learned to recognize at lot of things. I couldn’t repeat them to you so I guess that means I understand more Creole than I speak.

He carefully explained to Momma that if I would just “cut it” "RIGHT HERE" (and he’d show me the junction where the earpieces branched off from the plug) then he would have MORE strings. What could be better than having more string?? He even showed me another machin that he’d be able to play with if only he had more string!!


“See, Momma. Just right here. Cut it, Momma, cut it. Right here.”

Momma gently kept repeating that if we did that it would break and that it wasn’t a “string” like he thought it was. He unfortunately does NOT recognize several words that Momma uses. He was just convinced I wasn’t listening or didn’t understand. So he took matters into his own hands.



Or teeth rather.



He did succeed in biting through them. He was quite pleased with himself. And then, of course, he put the earbuds back in his ears and waited expectantly for the music to start.

Funny how you can also tell when your son is telling you to “fix it, Momma, fix it.”