Chatterbox

Maggie was in rare form today, verbally speaking. (Ha! I just realized that's a pun ... not intended.) From the time she woke up to the time she fell asleep a precious 18 minutes ago, she was talking. Constantly. It started at the mall playground when she repeated -- from about 25 feet away -- the lecture I'd given her on interrupting. "MOMMY!" she yelled from afar. "Don't interrupt me! It's not nice! Don't talk yet! Wait for me to finish. Do. Not. Interrupt!" Other mothers were laughing at this, while I tried to just ignore it after a while.

The hilarity reached its climax late this afternoon at the Just Between Friends consignment sale. Bobby loves looking through the toys for sale, so we met him there after he got off work. Maggie breezed through the age-appropriate-for-her toys and went right to the baby toys. (Why are preschoolers so fascinated by baby toys?) She fell in LOVE with a baby walker that looked a little like this, only with much more of a 1950's look to it:


Maggie was fascinated by, no obsessed with, this toy. Right about the time she started to climb in (against my warnings, I might add), her eyes got big and she immediately crossed her legs -- a sure sign that she needs to use the potty. As I took her to the restroom, she chattered the whole way about the car baby toy. By the time we'd arrived at the bathroom stall, she'd changed her story to one starring Caca (this is usually the way her stories work: Maggie does something, then -- surprise, surprise -- the very same thing happens to Caca!). Here, in a nutshell, is what she told me in the bathroom stall:

"Caca found a baby car toy and she wanted to play in it so I let her climb in it and she did and then she wanted me to push her and so I did and I spun her around and around and she got SO dizzy and then she got out and was so dizzy and I was just laughing and laughing at her and I said to her, 'You are cracking me up, Caca.'"

That's exactly the way she said it too ... going a mile a minute, with no breaths and no pauses. (Let it be known that it was so hard for me to type that just now; I take great moral offense at leaving out necessary punctuation.) ;)

Maggie's facial expressions were priceless; she was SO into telling this story, and her faced just danced with animation as she continued telling me about Caca getting dizzy. When she'd finished, I was laughing out loud, and I told her that she was the one cracking me up. The best part though, was that when we finished and opened the door to exit the stall, a lady was just standing out there listening. She was also laughing, and she leaned down and told Maggie, "I heard your story, and I loved it. You are precious." Well, that was all Maggie needed to hear, because she immediately repeated the story for the lady, word for word, not missing a beat. I'd pay a million dollars just to have it on video; it was so, so funny.

OK, technically speaking I guess you have to have a million dollars before you can pay a million dollars, so perhaps that part involves a tiny exaggeration. But it really, really was that funny.