Daniel has a flair that is all his own. We became convinced of this when he was only 8 months old, as he refused to crawl, preferring a more Doodle appropriate method of traversing our home, that of "Skittering." This involved a good deal of rolling, bottom bouncing, hip swinging and practically no hair on the back of his head. This method persisted until 14 months when a walk, that still consists of more bounce up than forward, took the place of "skittering."Now that Daniel has become highly verbal, he has not ceased asserting his imaginative independence, if, at times, for nothing else than to infuriate his older brother, a lover of truth and all corrections pertaining to it.
Daniel, in all his toddler tenacity, has taken to renaming the majority of things in his life. Sometimes these are simple modifications of pronunciation, easily mistaken for verbal infancy, like insisting "Nana" is "Neh-na" or "Poppy" is "Pop-pop." Or another mistake typical of the linguistic rookie, that of generalizing a particular, "joe-joe" (our cat), for a much, much larger genre of all things capable of motion on legs, any number of legs. This naming taboo was particularly painful for the older brother, as a "joe-joe" could be spotted virtually anywhere.
But all of these could still be passed off as normal development, sustained by the need for sibling individuality and destruction of big brother's sanity, if it were not for one of his most recent declarations. His Aunt Mer-mer's new cat, "Cheeto," has always been "Chip," and judging by the devious grin that follows it, he always will be.
