My friend and neighbor, Ronja, has the good fortune to be raised in a bilingual home. (mostly good fortune anyway, being reprimanded in German is a little scary for anybody) Ronja frequently stops by to give us an update on the goings on around the farm. She is a skilled and enthusiastic conversationalist and if inquisitiveness was a sport, she would be sponsored by Nike. She has taught me an important but subtle point about grammar. (For the record, I don't put much stock in grammar, it's just another example of majority rule) She often uses "them" where I would use "they". For example, she might say "I saw the dogs in the yard, them are digging holes." Initially I found this endearingly wrong, but I've realized that I am the one in error. "Them" is a much more specific and intimate pronoun than "they". When she says "them" she means "them, you know, the dogs" whereas "they" is a much more aloof and distant sort of thing. Or as Tiffany says, "they" adds 50 feet to whoever you're talking about.
Stella is in some kind of rapid mutation phase of toddlerhood. Her potbelly has slowly whittled away, apparently used as a fuel for her volatile opposition to all parenting. We can be happily osmonding along as a family when one of us makes the fatal mistake of suggesting that Stella do something (even if she is already doing it with apparent enjoyment) and then we are locked into a deadly contest of wills. The other day I offered her a spoon and it was like I had accidentally stepped into a cagematch with a rabid badger. She has also decided that 530 is a damn fine time to get up in the morning. I told Tiffany last night that if they made home vasectomy kits, I would have used five of them this week.
I love toddlers but them are ridiculous little tyrants sometimes. Maybe Stella's middle name should have been Bonaparte instead of Firefly.