So I was at home recently and managed to squeeze in a quick little
“hulo” to my little niece, who was standing with Gran and Pops, mouth “agog” at
the size of the bus I was about to come out of.
I saw her and she was all excited!
With a sweet little perfect banana shaped smile and ready to bolt toward
me when suddenly all that animated expression fell and she suddenly looked
unsure. She had spied some kind of
bearded monster emerging from behind me that she hadn’t expected.
She was told and Gran had said, “Now, Uncle Nick is coming
too, do you remember? He was here at
Christmas.” And although she said “yes”
she wasn’t listening because she was too busy building stuff.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for her to come round. And especially when, quite forcibly, she
insisted Nick was on her toy telephone and furthermore she insisted it was him
calling to himself and he should take the call. She was rather amused (but also
slightly bewildered) at the rather convincing telephone conversation he had
with himself. It confused her a little because
he did it so convincingly that she would take the phone away saying, “Hello? Hello?” into the speaker, then come back
through shouting, “NICKY! NICK! NICKY!”
and he was forced to speak to himself again, which I think eventually
was a little frustrating because his tea was out on the table and was getting
cold and as he told himself on the phone, “he really did have to go now because
his dinner was getting cold...but take care, yeah…(he must have told a joke to
himself because he laughed at this bit)..yeah, you too….bye now, bye.” And the end of that conversation seemed to
satisfy Amber for a while.
We have a funny little relationship, my niece and I. She now knows I must be connected in some way
to the people she knows, but I don’t think she knows quite in what way. I’m not there all the time, but see her often
enough that she remembers who I am and sometimes talks about me when I’m not
there. She knows I use a plane to come
to see her, but sometimes I emerge from within her Gran’s house from “up the
stairs” (the place she’s not really allowed to go). If I happened to be home and she was there, I
did stop calling her name from upstairs and slowly tiptoeing down to meet her
because it did dawn on me that to someone who wasn’t expecting it, this could
be really rather creepy in a sort of nightmarish way. So I stopped doing it.
She can see I’m taller than her which should mean I have
some kind of authority, but I make my body move in weird ways and sometimes
tell her what we’re going to do but in song using a Mr. Bean sort of voice. And I tend to ask her things and talk about
things that make her go “What?”, “Eh??” a lot because they don’t make sense to
her. I’m not sure she knows quite what I
am.
When we were walking back home from the bus stop I was
stomping ahead of my niece, directing her down all the right paths. I was showing her the correct way of walking
was leaning back at a slight right angle (leaning forward at the same degree
also works well) fixing your arms into sharp "L" shapes and swinging them to a
beat that’s in your own head in a robotic fashion, and then moving the legs in
a piston type movement, marching up and down making sure the knees reach as high
as a 36 year old human can.
After I was walking along the street like this shouting in a
kind of Mr. Bean tone, “THIS WAY! THIS
WAY AMBER, THIS WAY!!”, I heard from the distance this tiny, but frighteningly
mature little voice peep, “You’re Silly”.
That’s from a two and a half year old.
I just said, “What are you talking about? This is how I walk”.
I carried on walking like that for most of the way, while
she carried on walking in a more human like acceptable fashion.
