When little folks are struggling and learning language you realize just how difficult it is to translate another language.  Someone could pick up a cup and call it a cup, but they could be referring to the cup, the contents of the cup, or the act of picking it up.  You just don't know.  And so we have been on the case of a word mystery for about two weeks now.  We are trying to figure out what a "bakadu" is. 

Isaac calls people bakadus, but only when they are teasing him or he is teasing them.  He is a little annoyed but not actually mad.  So far I know that he will not call his Mommy a bakadu and his P-Pa is never a bakadu, but he will tease Nanna and call her a bakadu, but only to get a reaction out her.  He calls me a bakadu pretty regularly, but again never when he is actually mad, like if I am bringing him over to the Naughty Step.  His friend at school, Jonah, he is a bakadu as well.  None of his teachers are bakadus though. 

When you ask him what it means, he gives you a quick retort: "You a bakadu!", as if to say the answer is obvious.  I am not sure we know much else.  We listen for clues every time he says it, but usually it is something of an exclamation: BAKADU! so there is very little context clues to draw on.  We'll keep working on it, but it is a real challenge.  After the whole "Sweetheart Fiasco" we need to be extra vigilant with the little guy and his words.  So until we figure it out:

YOU A BAKADU!

In the old days, when map makers didn't know what was beyond the edge of the known world they would write on their masterpieces "there be monsters."  It was the geographical equivalent of "I have no friggin clue."  Similarly when you go to a restaurant and they say the wait is two hours, that really means, "we have no friggin clue".  No one takes two hours to eat, so a wait of two hours means the entire restaurant leaves and is reseated and they still won't reach you.  It is the restaurant equivalent of "there be monsters".  So when I saw they were calling for more than 24" of snow I knew that the weathermen and women were really saying "there be monsters" and in this case the monster's name was Nemo (when did we start naming winter storms?  Creation of a 24 hour news cycle perhaps?).

Dad stayed home on Friday even going grocery shopping Thursday night.  I-man stayed home and Bianca cleared everything but class.  So by 12:00 noon on Friday all the birds were home in the nest.  In fact, we were watching a movie, eating popcorn, and getting toasty by a fire.  Then the waiting began.  We knew it was going to be bad, but it didn't SEEM like a monster storm.  Isaac played around and Dad and Mom followed him.  Here he is busting out his Valentine's Day clingies:

We all watched.  Around 2 the flakes started really flying but there wasn't a lot of them, just a lot of movement.  The day wore on and Isaac was having a grand time entertaining us.  Here is Fancy Rambo:

Around 5, just as the last lights were fading, the storm started in earnest.  Lots and lots of snow and lots and lots of wind.  Isaac, still going strong, began playing with his art supplies.  Some of his markers have very tight caps and when you pulls them open he does so across his entire upper body.  This occasionally leads to things like this:

As the day ended the snow was swirling and was ready to unleash.  The next day, we awoke to see nature's fury.  Here it is:

I-man was quite the snow shoveling warrior.  He worked with Bianca and I for about an hour outside.  He was very good and as you can see he was equipped for the snow--a great pair of boots, a jacket, and snow pants.  The only chink in his snow armor was his extra small gloves, gloves he calls his "teeny tiny gloves".  These are a pair of gloves from last year that are way, way too small, but they afford him a lot of control so these are the only gloves he really likes.

Every once in a while I-man would take a brake and grab something to eat and drink:

He LOVED the snow.  And given that we didn't lose power and we had the ability to remove the snow, we liked it too.  As much as we got, the Snowpocalypse turned out to be a good weekend.  Dinos are coming up. 

One of the funniest things that Isaac has done in the past week has been his increasingly vocal objection to anyone other than himself being called Little One by Bianca.  It was a nickname I had that was ironic, me being about 8 inches taller than Bianca, but it stuck and she has called me Little One for more than decade now.  But one night, while talking on the cellphone she called me Little One and Isaac howled in protest.  She had called him Little One, in the unironic sense, too and he did not like that one little bit.  For Isaac, there is one and only one Little One and he is it.

He also does not like it when she called me sweetie or sweet pea.  He gets visibly angry when Bianca kisses me, and usually throws himself in between us when we are hugging.  In all it is a really, really funny thing to watch and a reminder that Dr. Freud was on to something...

But the most unusual behavior is this.  About three days ago Isaac kept saying something.  He would say it and get insistent.  Unfortunately we didn't understand what he was saying.  It was hard to get him to slow down and he kept repeating the phrase like a question.  When we didn't say yes he became even more upset.  Thursday was like this and Friday he became a little terror.  He'd ask us: "Tweet Hurt?" Bianca and I would look at each other and try to puzzle it out.  But nothing ever came.  I even woke up in the middle of the night thinking I had the solution to our linguistic puzzle--Throat Hurts.  But we asked I-man the next day and he shook us off like a rookie pitcher who just saw the sign for curveball instead of fastball. That was clearly not the right answer.  So we kept trying and he kept getting upset.  We'd ask him to show us what he was asking for and he would keep pointing to himself.  It made little sense.

Then it happened.  Like a lightning strike Bianca figured out what it was that he was saying.  He was asking us if he was our "sweet heart".  He'd come up to me and or Bianca and ask "Tweet Hurt?"  and from his perspective we were being rude and indignant or worse, demeaning.  He was probably thinking "why am I not there sweet heart anymore?"  Now that we figured it out, we have made sure to tell him that "yes, you are our sweetheart." 

How sweet is that?