Coming up Lanie

Background info: 1) Steve has been out-of-town since Tuesday so Emma and I are on our own. Aunt Susan, as luck would have it, has been working late every night so we don't see her much, either. Consequently, meals are very simple. 2) Emma has been practicing with rhyming and making up nonsense words. She sometimes spends many minutes just saying crazy things that mostly don't make sense. If she didn't have an amazing vocabulary and spend lots of time speaking clearly and logically, I would be worried. 3) Grandma has a goat named Lanie, whom Emma remembers quite fondly. Lanie may have come up in other posts- one time Lanie called Emma on the phone (thanks to creative Aunts KA and Susan). Grandma and Grandpa sent Emma a stuffed animal goat and kid. Emma calls them Lanie.

Story: Tuesday night Emma and I had tortellini with a mushroom, tomato sauce. Emma and I ate our tortellinis and chatted our way through the meal. Then Emma started on one of her silly word binges. I nodded along until she said, "Torte-Lanie!" At that point I was laughing so hard that my eyes watered. That was all the encouragement that Emma needed and she took Torte-Lanie to whole new levels of creative word fun. I have no idea if she was imagining Lanie covered with tortellinis. Or perhaps Lanie was very small and wrapped up like a tortellini. Or maybe it was just the words that worked so well together. Either way you cook it, it was darn funny.

Epilogue: Yesterday morning Emma woke up and said that she wanted steel cut oats with javelinas on them. I obliged, but had to tell her that you couldn't tell the oats from the javelinas when she asked to see them in her bowl. They were mixed in. When she kept insisting I think I mentioned something about it being pretend. Did she really think that I would put javelinas on her oats? What did she think that would look like? Is this something to be worried about?