Abigail's
stories are getting longer and longer. Sometimes she tells them
with a book in her hand, just as if she's reading, and sometimes she
tells them at the dinner table as if it's conversation, but they
generally all sound the same: an assortment of what she's heard
during the day, including television, nursery rhyme and grown-up
speak. She's like a little tape recorder that turns itself on
and off at random, and you never know when she will stop recording and hit play. You also never know when she is recording, and she has an unnerving habit of doing an exact impression of me saying something like, "Goodness gracious me, look at all the mess in here!" six weeks after I actually said it, or coming out with words like 'watermelon' after hearing them once two months ago.
She
scampers into my room in the morning, once Daddy can't restrain her
any longer from disturbing my 'lie in' at 7:30am, pokes me in the eye
and exclaims happily, "You wake upped!" Then she
clambers into bed and begins: "I'm Abi-gay-wuh. Hello
Abigaywuh, wouldjoo like to play with me, the lady said. She
play lots of toys, she say, and she want a cuddle up the stairs and
down the slide and into the balls. I said atishoo atishoo I say, all
flellover, in the balls, and we bounce on a trampoline and this is
the way the baby say wah, wah, all day long, all fall OFF."
“Good
morning, Abi” I respond. What else can I say? I have absolutely
no idea what she's talking about. It's tricky, because she could
actually be relating something that happened yesterday at a playgroup
while I wasn't there: in which case, this would be the first evidence
that she has an awareness of sequence or narrative. It's entirely
possible that she played with a lady in the ball pit, that she was
helped up and down the slide and that they went on to sing nursery
rhymes about falling down while bouncing on the trampoline and
jumping into the ball pit. On the other hand, this lengthy speech
could be a stream-of-consciousness style combination of nonsense and
echolalia, and Abi might be just as clueless as I am about its
meaning. I suspect that was true of this evening's offering, however
much it sounded like a conversation:
“Glory,
glory, gloooory, God is there 'cause he is everywhere. Jesus is
hungry he say.”
“Jesus?
He's hungry?”
“Yes,
Jesus want a cuddle and he eat a biscuit biscuit.”
“Right.
Jesus is eating a breakfast biscuit.”
“God
want a biscuit. The crocodile not want a biscuit biscuit.”
“No,
I don't expect crocodiles eat breakfast biscuits.”
“There
a spider coming.”
“Is
there? Do spiders eat biscuits?”
...and
on, and on, and on. My replies are futile attempts to shed some
light on what actually goes on inside her head, and to prevent myself
from going completely crazy. As far as I can tell, the landscape of
Abigail's mind looks like a sort of infantile painting by Salvador
Dali, where all the eggs are Humpty Dumpty and everybody keeps giving
each other cuddles.
No,
wait. That's oddly familiar...
...I
think I've just worked out why In the Night Garden is such a popular
television show for toddlers...
