A Typical Conversation with Cal

A typical conversation with Cal, if you can stick it out, is pretty long and covers multiple topics. Here’s an example from last night:

Me: “Cal, starting tomorrow we’re going to really work at no thumb sucking. So we’ll start the star system again and we’ll probably put something on your thumb to keep you from sucking it.”

Cal: “Yeah, we’ll put pizza sauce on it.”

Me: “Well, not pizza sauce because that tastes too good.”

Then somehow we transitioned to the topic of pumps because Cal remembered the “pump” at the dentist’s office this morning.

Cal: “We have a pump. Here’s my pump <sitting up in his bed, facing the railing>. And <pointing to the rocking chair in his room> there’s the squishy thing.”

Me: “Hmm.”

Cal: “We use a pump on our bicycle. But we don’t pump too much because it will blow up. But we don’t put gas in our bicycle.”

Me: “That’s right. Do you know how we make our bicycle move?”

Cal: “No.”

Me: “Mommy pedals it like this <I move my fists and arms in the motion of pedaling a bicycle>.”

Cal: “Yeah, and we don’t drag our feet on the sidewalk because we’ll get splinters.”

Me: “Well, you don’t really get splinters from the sidewalk… you get splinters from a tree or from a wooden deck.” (Obviously, I’ve gotten a splinter from a wooden deck before.)

Cal: “What do you get from a sidewalk?”

Me: “Well, you get scratches and scrapes.”

Cal: “Scrapes? What’s a scrape?”

Me: “A scrape is a BIG scratch.”

Cal: “Scrape… rake… that rhymes.”

And it went on from there and ended at him muttering some nonsensical non-words. That’s generally my cue to exit the conversation.