In their language

My boys both have good vocabularies and talk almost nonstop while they're awake. But unless you're around them a lot, their dialect is a little tricky to understand. Here's a handy translation guide for the things you'd hear if you were to hang around our house for any length of time.

AH-mee-oh Boy 2 wakes up in the morning with this word on his lips. It's his most favorite food. You may know it better as "oatmeal." (Not to be confused with AH-moh, the furry red monster from Sesame Street.)

OX What Boy 2 calls those tube-like garments that one wears on one's feet. For some reason, he does not pronounce an initial s in most words, though he seems to have no trouble with s's that occur elsewhere.

Bee dee A mysteriously flexible word that can mean any number of things to Boy 2. It's all in the context. If he says it while pointing out the window, he meant "birdie." If he says it while reading a book, the page may have a picture of a birdie or a piggy. Or sometimes when he just can't find the right word, "bee dee" is what comes out.

OH-nees Short for "macaronis," this term actually applies to any variety of pasta. Boy 1 started saying it when he was pretty small and hasn't given it up yet. Boy 2 uses Boy 1's word now, too. Boy 2, though, is more apt to say "noodles" unless Boy 1 starts the conversation, in which case he'll mimic the Boy 1 version willingly. Apparently we're raising Boy 2 to be bilingual.

WOOM! Star Wars fans will recognize Boy 2's WOOM! as a light saber. Boy 2 got one for Christmas, and Boy 2 has since appropriated it for himself. This particular model lights up and has sound effects. It goes WOOM!; therefore, that's what it is.

MUK! MUK! MUK! Boy 2's version of "milk," this term applies to any liquid sipped from a cup. He also understands "drink" and will parrot back "dink" with a nod if someone asks, but on his own he usually opts for "muk." Which is understandable since he'd rather drink milk than anything else.

GAH I drive one.

STAH-bees Boy 2 is quite enthusiastic about these cheery red fruits. Boy 1 loves them, too, though in his earlier parlance he called them SAW-babies. Oh yeah--we're talking strawberries here.

And then unexpectedly, at intervals throughout the day, Boy 2 will pop out with something so unmistakable, you do a double-take and wonder whether it was just a fluke. I suspect it's not!

Though he still speaks with a toddler accent, Boy 1 is past most of his oddball pronunciations of individual words now. But that doesn't mean he's entirely comprehensible. Nowadays he adapts his stream of chatter to suit his own understanding by stringing together unrelated favorite phrases or swapping whole words. On any given day, you might hear him rewrite a scene from Henny Penny or Goodnight Moon to feature Cookie Monster or Mickey Mouse instead. He might set a familiar rhyme to a different tune. When he wants to talk but has nothing to say, he might drop random lines from TV commercials into conversation. But one of my favorite Boy-isms is this one. According to Boy 1, this is how each episode of the original Star Trek series (which, for some reason, he absolutely adores) is introduced.

Space, the a final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year fire mission: to explore strange stay new worlds; to seek out circle new life and new civilizations [indistinguishable mutter]; to boldly only go where no man snowman has gone before.

 That snowman--he sure gets around!!