E – I – E – I – Ohhh?!

As Nolin turns 15 months today, I think there may be a good chance that he will become a farmer when he gets older.  He is very interested in flowers, fruits, vegetables, animals and of course tractors.

As I am mowing the lawn, you can catch Nolin running from one side of the house to the other yelling tractor, tractor just wanting to get a glimpse of the John Deer and hoping that he may be able to hitch a ride.  This excites me because as he gets older, I can’t wait to turn over the lawn mowing privileges to him.

Not a day (or a meal) goes by where you wont hear Nolin asking for blue berries (thankfully Don sent us around 20 lbs of blueberries from his garden), kiwi, bananas or apples.  He loves all the foods his dad hates.

Animals are a particular favorite.  He started off with sheep, horses, cows, dogs, and lions.  You can ask him what they say and he will give you the sound.  Since then he has moved on to doggies, turtles, pandas, monkeys, giraffes and more.  Lately he has been very interested in buffalo.  He sees the North America painting in his room that has two buffalo in it and he will point at them and excitedly say buffalo.

What makes this even more fun is that he now also loves the song Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley.  As soon as we start singing it or I start playing it on guitar he runs over to my Djembe drum and starts banging along with the song.  He will then sing the words Buffalo, America (pronounced mare-eeka) and of course the yoy, yoy, yoy.  This is one of his new favorite past times and barely a night goes by where we don’t have a family jam session before he goes to bed.

I believe he found this love for animals with the songs Ba Ba Black Sheep and Old McDonald Had A Farm.  If Nolin ever gets emotional or upset, you can start singing these songs and he will stop and focus all of his attention on you (just a helpful pointer for any future babysitters).

Now when we were traveling to Europe this song was completely over done as we would sometimes sing it for 20 minutes straight.  There are only so many animals you can pull from the top of your head after 20 minutes.

We didn’t realize it at first, but all of a sudden Nolin started saying a few very inappropriate words.  It was strange because he definitely wasn’t hearing them from us.  We figured out that our reliance on Old McDonald had confused him a bit.

It seems that chickens and ducks need to be eliminated from Mr. McDonald’s farm.  See Nolin was getting the D in duck mixed up with an F.  To make things worse he began thinking that every bird was a duck.  Which became interesting as he ran around St. Patrick’s Cathedral chasing birds and screaming (his version of) Duck!

It was in the Chinese Restaurant when we realized that we couldn’t use Chicken anymore because they say cluck cluck.  Nolin liked to leave out the L in that word, but felt an immense pride repeatedly saying cluck as he strutted around.

Everyday Nolin’s personality comes out more and more.  He is a sponge and literally picks up everything you do and say.  It has now become important for us to make sure we don’t have any parental slips that could come back to haunt us. I guess we will have to be careful next time we decide to partake in a family sing-a-long of E-I-E-I-Ohhh!