Yelling at Strangers

There is a point in every child’s development that lies just between the learning of words and the learning of what words are appropriate in which situation.  This two-year-old zone is an exciting place to be, because one never knows which phrases your child may have picked up, and one also never knows at whom these phrases might be shouted.  To illustrate a typical day in this two-year-old zone, I will describe to you the events of yesterday afternoon.

My five-year-old is taking a creative drama class after school which meets downtown on Monday afternoons.  We drove there as usual, but I did not have any change for the meter so I decided to park in my new staff parking spot at the church.  This made sense since I was going to spend the duration of the class in the choir room trying to choose upcoming anthems anyway.  All of this is really just to say that we had to walk a few extra blocks to get to the class, which meant that we had to pass by, and possibly interact with, other humans.

Ruby is 5.  She mostly gets the human social interaction thing.  Sure, she is still learning, but she does have a general amount of appropriateness (not from my side of the family).  Edward, on the other hand, is in the zone.  The post-speaking, pre-social awareness zone that I was discussing earlier.  How can you tell?  Well, on our little walk we passed two rough looking gentlemen standing outside of a bar smoking.  They both had a lot of leather on, with piercings and tattoos and the like, and had big bushy beards of the scraggly variety covering dirty faces.  They were engaged in a salty conversation, leaned up against the building with their feet planted about a quarter of the way out into the sidewalk.  The problem was, Edward was walking on the sidewalk, and he was walking close to the building.  And he did not want to alter his path in any way.

“HEY YOU!” he shouted at the men, who were clearly taken aback by his angry shout.  “YOU MOVE YOU FOOTS!  WATCH OUT YOU FOOTS!” Edward continued to yell at them until they stood up straight and moved their feet out of his way, letting him pass.  He stomped by them, glaring the whole time in their direction for daring to have been in his way in the first place.  Thank goodness they seemed to be amused by the situation.

Having escaped with our lives, and after telling Edward that it is not nice to yell at people, we finally made it to Ruby’s class.  To get to the class we had to take the elevator up to the third floor, and when the elevator arrived to pick us up on the first floor, it was full of people.  Edward tried to get on, but I explained to him that we need to let the other people off of the elevator before we could get on to it.  He accepted this gracefully and stood to the side while all of the passengers departed, waiting his turn before running on and pushing any buttons that he could reach.

We made it to the third floor and dropped Ruby off at her class and then headed back to the church.  This meant another elevator ride down to the lobby.  When the door slid open on the third floor, we saw a postal worker standing in the elevator, looking confused and hitting the lobby button.  Since this person was clearly not getting out, I started to get in, but Edward was not having it.

“GET OUT!” he shouted at the startled letter carrier.  “YOU GET OUT RIGHT NOW!”  He pointed violently at the floor outside of the elevator.

“Edward,” I said smiling and trying to show the poor woman that I did not condone this attack, “She’s not coming out of the elevator; she’s going down too, so we can get on.”

“NO!  YOU GET OUT DA ELLABATOR!  RIGHT NOW!” he shrieked as loudly as he possibly could.  Well, I ushered him in forcefully and pushed the “close door” button, trying to keep him away from the federal employee who was becoming more and more disgruntled with every passing moment.  When we hit the lobby she took off pretty quickly, apparently not as amused as the smokers we had accosted earlier.

So I’m very glad that Edward’s speech delay is a thing of the past, and I’m very happy that he is able to express himself a lot better now than he ever could previously.  But with great power comes great responsibility.  He knows how to talk.  I just have to teach him when to talk.