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https://ift.tt/2I4lh5Sbomberqueen17:
I got another Niece Story. (My sister’s kid, 19 months, cute as a fucking button; her parents are organic farmers and ruthless businesspersons and I spend about a week a month with them.) I swear this one’s not dumb. This kid has an innate ability to pun that goes beyond precocious into just plain inexplicable.
So she’s been a little under the weather lately, and thus has been very clingy on her mother– nursing a lot even though she’s almost weaned, insisting on her mother even when she’s normally happy to play with other family members, etc. My sister, who has also been under the weather, has had less patience with it, but has resigned herself, as one does, and so has frequently said, “awww, you need Mommy,” as she musters up her last reserves of patience to deal with an unneccessarily floppy floor-is-lava kid who can damn well walk on her own but is choosing not to at the moment.
“Right, right, you need Mommy,” she said today at lunch, as Child clung fiercely to her leg and made it very difficult for her to bring the food to the table. (The farm crew all eats together, and there’s a rotation of whose day it is to cook, and it was her day, and it had been A Fucking Chore with this limpet baby.)
“Need Mommy,” Child whined, making grabby hands at her mother as she picked her up. “Neeeeeed Mommy,” Child repeated, working her little hands along her mother’s shoulder in a weird grabby gesture.
Mommy sat down, and passed Child to the child’s father. “Need Daddy,” the child said, making her I’m-kidding face (which is a distinctive face, mouth pulled in, teeth showing, very goofy, slyly watching for a reaction, and she makes it for everything from deliberately answering a question wrong to deliberately doing something insanely dangerous she’s been repeatedly told not to). And she took her tiny hands and grabbed her father’s arm and squeezed at it. Then she climbed down and came over to me, and grabbed my leg. “Need Beegee,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I said, “dude, she’s kneading me.”
“Neeeed,” she echoed, quite pleased with herself. I looked over at her mother, whose face was blank with shock.
“How the hell does she know what kneading is,” she said. They get bread by bartering chickens for it at the farmer’s market, this kid has never witnessed a loaf of bread being formed.
“She’s part cat,” her father said. We all looked at him. “Well,” he said, “her mother’s at least twenty-five percent cat, don’t look at me!”
“Neeeed,” the child said, thoroughly smug, and went off to knead the farm hands.
“No matter what,” I told the closer farm hand, a woman of twenty, “your next job will not have coworkers as weird as this one.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, watching the toddler knead her forearm. (Earlier this week, the child, who is obsessed with the song Happy Birthday, had demanded it be sung not only for the farm hand in question, but also separately for said farm hands’ hair. Tonight, Child demanded that Happy Birthday be sung to her mother’s armpit hair. “Make that twice,” my sister amended via text, as she was telling the story.)
i was going back through my own archives for Reasons, and found this absolute gem from august of 2015 that i had totally forgotten. enjoy, vintage Farmbaby.
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