Anita smiled at his play and turned to the cabinet under the sink. She opened the door and reached inside to withdraw a bright yellow object which she hide from Howard’s view. Anita plopped it in the tub and sat down on the toilet seat as she said, “Mommy bought a bath toy for you too! Can you find it, Honeybunch? I think it wants to come out and play!”
Howard nodded and reached forward to search under the froth with his hands. He located the toy and grabbed the wet object with both hands to keep the slippery rubber thing from getting away from him. As he squeezed it in his tiny fists, the room was filled with a loud “Quack!”. Howard jumped back in surprise and took the submerged object from its blanket of obscuring bubbles for closer inspection. It was a rubber duck! She had given him a huge yellow rubber duck with baby blue eyes and an orange beak for a bath toy! Anita smiled in amusement at his surprised look and said, “What do you say to Mommy, Howie? Remember, Mommy only wants you to talk babytalk, Sweetiepie!”
“Thank you, Mommy,” Howard said obediently.
“Little boys have problems making the ‘Th’ sound, Honeybunch. Mommy wants you to substitute a ‘T’ sound instead. And why don’t you call me ‘Mama’ the way you did before? Can you do that for Mommy?”, Anita asked.
“Tank you, Mama,” Howard said, sounding exactly like a toddler.
“Good baby! Now your next lesson is even easier! Have you ever listened to little boys talk? It takes a loooong time to learn how to make the ‘L’ and ‘R’ sounds. Because they can’t make the sound, they substitute a ‘W’ sound instead. Why don’t you try that, Honeybunch? Say, ‘I love Mommy’ the way a little boy would. Remember not to use the pronoun ‘I’ when you talk!”
Howard thought a minute and said, “Me wuv Mama!”
“Now for your next lesson, Mommy wants you to think about baby names for things. Babies add an ‘IE’ to the endings of names to make things small and cute like them. For instance, your duck would be called a duckie! Say it for Mommy, Honeybunch!”
“Duckie!”, Howard said.
“Now tell me you like your duck, Sweetheart!”, Anita suggested.
“Me wike duckie!”, Howard said in his high pitched voice.
“Good baby! Now Mommy wants you to name everything in this room whose name starts with a ‘L’ or ‘R’ while she gets things ready for you to go to bed, okay?”, Anita said in her sweetest manner.
Despite himself, Howard was beginning to enjoy the game of sounding like a toddler. If he controlled his cadence, he sounded exactly like one. He pointed to the overhead light and said, “wight” and followed it by pointing to the duck and saying, “wubber”. Then he looked around the room for other things. He saw the towel rack and said, “wack” and spotted his razor and said, “wasor”, finally he saw Anita’s hand lotion on the counter and said, “wotion”.
While Howard was engaged in his language lesson in babytalk, Anita left the room and came back with a large plastic box about the size of the sink. She turned it upside-down on the tile of the bathroom floor so Howard couldn’t see it prematurely and went to the overhead cabinet to get out the jar of vaseline and a pink pencil shaped case. She put the case in her pocket and the jar on the back of the toilet, then resumed her position on the toilet seat, all the while listening to Howard practice his babytalk. When he ran out of objects to name, she said, “Now name all the animals a baby might know, Honeybunch. See if you can guess how a baby would pronounce them.”
Anita dipped a washcloth in the water and lathered it well with a bar of Johnson’s baby soap as he recited the names of the farmyard animals; duckie, birdie, fishie, kitty, bunny, doggie, piggie, horsy, and goosie.” When he got to sheep and cows, he was stumped. He frowned in concentration while Anita soaped his back and began scrubbing him. He looked up at her and said, “Cow?”
Anita smiled and said, “Try “Moo-cow”, Darling!” and took his arm to scrub his elbow.
Howard said, “Moo-cow!” and followed it with a querulous, “Sheep??”
“Sheeps,” Anita corrected and began washing his fingers, “Now use the words in sentences, Sweetie!”
“Doggie wun away. Horsie wun fast! Kitty go meow. Birdie fwap wings!”, Howard grinned at the last sentence, he was proud of that one!
“Continue,” Anita said as she started washing the other arm.
“Bunny go hop. Piggie go oink!”, said Howard.
“Now name the things in a baby’s room. What do you call a baby bottle?”, Anita asked.
“Me not know, Mama!”, Howard replied.
“Ba-ba,” answered Anita for him, “Now ask Mommy for your bottle!”
“Me n..not twink from ba-ba!”, Howard exclaimed. His mouth opened in surprise at the words that came out. He had intended to say drink, but the word had transformed itself into “twink” without conscious thought. What was happening to him?
Anita smiled at his mispronunciation of drink, but her grin became broader when she thought, “You may not ‘twink’ from a ba-ba today, Honeybunch, but you’re getting younger every day. It won’t be long before that’s the only thing you can ‘twink’ from!”
“Ask for your bottle, Honeybunch,” she said as she lifted his leg to wash it.
“Me wan’ ba-ba,” Howard replied with distaste. “What the Hell had happened to the “T” sound at the end of want? For that matter, how the Hell did the ‘dr’ phoneme become ‘tw’?”, Howard thought in surprise, “Was his babytalk becoming automatic?”
“Ask for your blanket, Sweetheart,” she said lifting the other leg.
“Me wan’ bwankie,” Howard replied.
What do you tell Mommy when your panties are soggy?”, she asked as she hauled him to his feet and began scrubbing his bottom.
“Me wet, Mama!”, he dutifully replied.
“And what do you say when you make a smellie in your panties, Honeybunch?”, Anita asked as she took his tiny testicles in her hand and began soaping them.
“Me poopie?”, Howard asked.
Anita nodded in agreement and asked as she washed his diminutive penis, “And what do you say when you need a fresh diaper, Honeybunch? I’ll give you a clue. Babies call diapers ‘dydees’!”
“Wan’ dydee!”, Howard replied.
“Good boy! You sound just like a baby! Let’s get you out of the tub and dried off, okay?”, she said lifting him from the tub and setting his feet on the rug. She buffed him dry and said, “Let Mommy weigh and measure you, Honeybunch.”
She put him on the scale and read off his weight; thirty seven pounds. Then she stood him next to the door and took a tape measure from her pocket and spanned his height with the tape. He was exactly forty inches. She wrote the numbers on her palm with a pen that she took from her pocket and then put it away. Anita took him by the hand and led him back to the toilet, saying, “It’s time to take your temperature, Baby. Be a good boy and it will all be over in a jiffy.”