“Owie” As in a 19 month old’s version of “OW, that hurts!”

If you sensed sarcasm in the title about this being “good,” you guessed correctly. I know what you’re thinking, “Isn’t it a good thing that she can alert you to the fact that she is in pain?”  Yes. If she actually used the word correctly that might be a good thing. However, Lilly has chosen to employ her own meaning for the word.

“What might that be,” you ask? She uses it for an all-purpose “I’m not happy” phrase. She has a gift for making it sound desperately pathetic. “owie, owie, owie!”with the occasional “OWIE!!!” thrown in. This is particularly charming when we are in public. Like when I am trying to buckle her into her car seat and she doesn’t want to go, or when I need to carry her because there are lots of cars around but she wants to walk, or when she is walking and we’re holding hands but she wants to go in a different direction than we need to go. My personal favorite is when I am trying to put her into the child’s seat part of a grocery store cart. She HATES to sit in it and would rather be in the large grocery compartment of the cart. But then she eats all my groceries, through the plastic produce bags, before we even get to the checkout counter. That’s always a fun conversation:

Clerk – looking at my empty cart: Were you going to buy anything today, miss?

Me: Yes, but my daughter seems to have eaten it all.  Please go ahead and charge me for 2 bell peppers, 3 bananas, a gallon of milk and an onion.

Lilly: *Burp*

So I’ve taken to forcing Lilly to sit in the proper child-seat area which results in many “owie, owie, OWIE’s.”  People think I’m maiming my child. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people follow me, very nonchalantly, to my car while dialing child protective services and reporting my license plate number.

I know I’ll look back fondly on all of this one day and find it amusing. In the mean time: Does anyone run a grocery delivery business?

Our little Trouble Bug!