Thank sweet baby jesus mom’s traveling

***

Because Dana and I torture the poor child with our overzealous brand of yuppie parenting and largely buy her only wooden toys or the kind of dolls that would leave little Amish children thinking “Ew, how plain …” — and don’t even get us started on TV (well, most TV) — we were curious to see what would happen when Emmeline opened the gift her grandparents purchased for her second birthday.

It required batteries. And had real buttons! It would be a treat.

After cupcakes and ice cream, we put the gift in the center of our still-empty living room and watched as she revealed a new resident for her growing menagerie jungle creatures.

“Ooh!” she screamed, “An ele-pant!”

The animal was painted a delightful Smurf blue and had a long, billowy trunk that, when turned on, danced around like an obese, epileptic worm. Emme seemed rather happy with the new addition, and probably would have been thrilled to just stare at it or maybe make it bake her cookies, as she does with the rest of her animals and her vivid imagination. Instead, we wanted her to have real fun for a change.

“Let’s play the game!” we urged, pushing the power button and handing her an oversized net because like its real-life counterparts, this elephant sneezed butterflies out of its 5-foot-long plastic trunk.

Every now and then, Emme still makes it clear she is not over this trauma.

As soon as the trunk started shaking and spitting insects, she bolted into my arms, slammed her eyes shut and chanted, “Bye bye bye bye bye! Ele-pant goes bye bye bye!”

That was almost two months ago now. We haven’t brought the elephant down from its hiding spot and we haven’t urged her to give it another try. Yet, every once in a while, Emme will shake herself out of some horrible daydream and declare, “Emme doesn’t want to play with her blue ele-pant! No no no! Bye bye!”

The same thing applies to Santa Claus. It’s been, what? Almost half a year since we forced her into the jolly arms of a stranger at the mall? But having run out of other things to read, Dana pulled down a Christmas book the other day, only to hear Emme scream, “Emme doesn’t want to sit on Santa!”

A child’s memory is a remarkable thing. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about her ability to recall even the tiniest detail from books or conversations or events months afterward, and I wonder if it’s a new development, this ability to remember everything, or whether she has had this skill since birth and is just better at articulating it now. It’s more than a little frightening to consider she might remember all the horrible things we said about her during that first, taxing month, and a pang of aching guilt sweeps over me every time I think about it. Just how much from how long ago, I wonder, does she recall?

Occasionally she’ll mime a word from the sign language we taught her so many months ago. After we moved, I had to drive back to the old place for something, and even though we were blocks away from our destination, Emme must have noticed a familiar street, because she said, “Daddy’s going to Emme’s old home.”

She’s been pulling song lyrics out of the blue recently, and I have to admit it’s rather embarrassing to hear a 2-year-old suddenly break out with, “Running just as fast as we can …” I haven’t sung her Tiffany in more than a year. I swear. And she has started to get rather annoyed when I mess up all the names I have arbitrarily given, well, everything.

Dana left for a business trip yesterday, and to get Emme to stop asking, “Where’s mommy? When’s mommy coming home?” I told her we’d go to the zoo.

“The caro-tel’s not broken today,” she said immediately, and I couldn’t even remember when I told her the carousel was broken in what must have been an ill-conceived attempt to avoid it that day.

We don’t go to the zoo very often, but Emme still remembered enough to lead me around the place, pointing out the path to the giraffes and gorillas and reminding me for the 100th time that the carousel was not broken and that it was, in fact, “over there, near the food. Daddy pays. Emme rides.”

After a few hours of becoming an animal husbandry dummy to a goat who clearly knows how to appreciate springtime, I buckled Emme into the car and tried to find my way out of the zoo. Dana often makes fun of my driving and my tender grasp of direction, and although I consider her an habitual liar, I’m always glad she’s not with us at the zoo. Because every time I go there, I find it almost impossible to leave. I circle the parking lot at least three times while searching for the exit, and I would bet good money the security guards are just having fun with visitors by putting cones in front of the exit gates and the removing them minutes later.

After two trips around the parking lot today, I sighed loudly and started tapping the wheel.

From the back seat, Emme said, “Daddy needs to ask the guy.”

At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then I remembered the words I had exchanged with a very perplexed security guard the last time I was searching for an exit.

“No I don’t.” I laughed, waving her off.

But she piped up again.

“Daddy needs to roll down the window and ask the guy.”

“What? No, I don’t. I can do this. Daddy’s smarter than the parking lot, I swear!”

I stopped the car, looked around and sighed again, wondering briefly whether I actually was smarter than asphalt and whether the gorillas would share their pen if we didn’t make it out by nightfall. From the back seat, I heard laughter.

And then this: “Daddy needs to ask the guy where the jesus the mother funny exit is.”

Well that just goes to prove it: Clearly her memory is hazy, bordering on the downright fantastical. But what she really needs is a lesson in pronunciation, because there are times I have absolutely no idea what she obviously learns from her mother.