Liam talks pretty much non-stop, building sentences upon sentences with if/then thought processes, and words that we haven’t heard before pop out all the time along with familiar words in different contexts, especially similes. The word thing is hard sometimes for everyone, though. “Okay, Liam, it’s time for the ritual,” we said at the Yule gathering. “We go to the airport?” he said, picking up his car and looking at the door. We puzzled over the airport question for a while until we realized that he heard ‘the ritual’ as ‘dirigible’. He was moderately disappointed when it ended up being a circle with a candle and some poetry, although there were oranges at the end of it which were kind of cool. Liam was old enough to really have fun this Christmas. Somewhere around the time we put up the tree, he clued in to the Santa thing. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at me with huge eyes. “Santa… going to be in my house!” he said. It was like he’d suddenly understood that a rock star was going to walk in to the room and breathe the same air. For days after Christmas he’d wake up and ask us eagerly, “More presents?” And it wasn’t annoying, because he really truly loved everything he opened each day from Yule well into the end of December. They just kept coming from different people.

On our doctor’s advice we got him a play doctor’s kit, and he was involved with it right away. “Oh, what this? What this?” he said, pulling tool after tool out of the little white box, and we explained each of them to him. He put the stethoscope around his neck and looked up with pride. “Look, I Doctor Liam! I listen to your heart? I look in your ears?” Everyone’s ears were thoroughly inspected, even Maggie’s. He produced his ophthalmoscope at his last doctor’s appointment to look in her ears, but quickly abandoned it when he saw that hers had a real window and a light in it. He casually tried to leave with it, too, but we caught him.

No matter how much of a game we make that air mask, there are tears and protests, although they get shorter every time. Even while crying he will clap and say, “Yay, Mama, you did it” when we’ve finished and I’ve whisked it away from his face. It’s kind of heartbreaking to hear him encourage me while he sobs. In a moment of inspiration HRH gave him the old ones to play with (minus the actual canisters of medication, of course). Right away Liam was handling it and putting it over his face and breathing in like a pro, then administering it to Little Liam, AKA Kid Canada (the soft boy doll he received as a Christmas gift from the Preston-LeBlancs). It would seem that his problems with the thing are that (a) we make him do it instead of it being his choice, and (b) he can’t operate it by himself. The old mask and inhalers are now an official part of his doctor’s kit.

Catalogues and toy flyers are some of his favourite things. “Oh, what car do you like?” he asks, perusing a list of toys, and when you answer he says, “Otay, we go get it now?” Sneaky! When cuddling with him the other night after his asthma attack, he felt for my hand and gently slipped one of his favourite cars into it. “Here,” he said tenderly, “you can hold Doc.” It touched my heart.

He’s such a goof. Sometimes he’ll lean in for a kiss then lick us instead, wriggling away and giggling madly. He suddenly announced that he was a kitten the other day, asking us to tie a tail onto his belt loop and then crawling around on all fours. He spins in place, then stops and throws his hands out, staggering and saying, “Oh, I so diiiiiizzy.” He thinks blowing raspberries on Maggie’s fur is hilarious. The amount of pretending has shot through the roof. “I so-and-so,” he’ll say, “You such-and-such. Let’s play!” In the car he’s either silent or has a full-time running commentary on what’s going on. “Tunnel coming! There a bridge! Look, a truck, where it going?” Every once in a while when we come to a stoplight he’ll point in a random direction and say, “We go… THAT way!” I’m tempted to let him navigate someday when the weather is nicer, just to see where we end up. He also likes to snatch my glasses off the bridge of my nose and put them on, then walk around looking at the floor saying, “I see everything broken!” (Not something we encourage, let me tell you.)

New sayings include “Just a sec!” and “I have a big idea!” The other day I was trying to get him to do something and he said, “No! Wait! I have to dance!” And he went to the middle of the room and danced for a bit, then came back and did whatever it was I was trying to get him to do. It was hilarious. He will also sometimes say, “Mama, you so pretty” or “Dada, you look so cool!” unprompted when we change clothes for some reason. On the other hand, he has further developed on the idea of commanding people to stop singing. “No! No singing!” he will say if I hum or sing along to something. Now it’s gone further, and he will say, “No! No dancing!” if we bop our heads in time to music. It was tough around Christmas because I play a lot of jazz-based seasonal CDs. He said, “No no, Mama, no singing, no dancing!” while his grandparents were here, which prompted my mother to say, “What is he, Presbyterian?” (A reference, of course, to the Calvinist outlawing of song and dance. We howled together over that one for a while.)

He is very aware of people’s emotional states now. “You sad?” he will say, or “You happy!” in response to tone of voice or body language. We were reading Beatrix Potter’s The Roly-Poly Pudding the other day and I had to dial down my acting because he was getting very upset listening to me read the distracted Tabitha Twitchett, looking for her kittens while being sure the rats had eaten them. Even when I deliver certain storybook lines with no emotional inflection whatsoever, he will look up at me and say, “You mad”, or “You happy now” and be right according to the story. He asks us to read a lot, and we’re fine with that. He’s begun changing the names of characters in stories too, to match members of the family. “That not Tom Kitten, that Maggie,” he will say, and for the rest of the book the character must be called Maggie or he will correct whoever is reading. He will point to the main character and identify them as Liam, their parents or other adult figures as Mama and Dada, and if you slip and read the actual name on the page you are gently but firmly reprimanded. (Our favourite rewriting is of The Paper Bag Princess, where Liam replaces Princess Elizabeth.) Last night Mittens, Moppet, and Tom Kitten were Nixie, Cricket, and Maggie respectively.

On Christmas day when I was almost finished making dinner, he came into the kitchen and asked to play with me. “I’m busy now, but look, you can hide in here,” I said, and lifted the edge of the linen tablecloth. He dove under the table and chuckled a lot, then went and collected a couple of cars and HRH to play under there with him. Playing under the table had never occurred to him before, but suggesting it once was enough. Now he likes to take his after-meal fruit under there with him. He tries to negotiate having dinner there too. His current favourite foods are chicken nuggets, smiley fries, scrambled egg, bananas, apples, warm milk with a couple of drops of vanilla extract in it, and chocolate milk. He quite likes old-fashioned banger sausages, too. Rice and corn are always hits, as are carrots.

This past month he was (re) introduced to the memory of Gulliver. HRH has a little ornament of a ginger cat wearing a witch’s hat and sitting on a pile of books. Liam grabbed for it when HRH put it on the tree, and HRH caught his hand. He explained that it was very special to him, and that it was a statue of Gulliver. Liam didn’t know who Gulliver was, so I found the photo of HRH with Gully on one knee and a four-month-old Liam on the other. After pointing at the baby and saying it was Tallis, he scrutinized the cat and said, “Where he go?” We explained that Gulliver had gotten sick, and had died. Liam wanted to hold the picture so I printed one out for him, along with another photo of Gully and Nixie curled up asleep in Liam’s Moses basket. He calls him ‘Guviller’, and pets the photos. He wanted the ornament, so HRH hung it up in his room for him, where ‘Guviller’ can watch over him as he sleeps. When we decorated the house for Christmas he wanted lights in his room too, so HRH pulled out all sorts of lights for him to choose from… but Liam found a string of pumpkin lights we use at Hallowe’en and insisted on them. So he had pumpkin lights in his room over Christmas, and ‘Guviller’ was hung from them.

Apart from death he asked about war this past month, and I had to try to explain it in terms that a two year old could understand. I was so choked up about the wrongness of having to teach a preschooler about war that I don’t remember what I said. Something about how sometimes people don’t agree about very big issues, and they send people and machines to fight one another, and the people who aren’t fighting have to run and hide from planes and such. What do you say to a preschooler who asks what war is? What can you say?

I haven’t a clue.