Phone Chats

Since I do travel so much, I try to remember to call every morning and every evening to check in. I ask the standard set of questions, How did Roo sleep? How did she wake up? What did she have for breakfast? How was school? Did she do any art projects? What did she eat for dinner? Blah, blah, blah. I guess I think that by asking those questions, I am still somewhat involved in her day…from 1500 miles away.

Typically when I call Kerry puts the phone on speaker (we have been doing this for each other since she was an infant) and he proceeds to try to convince Roo to speak to me. He says “Roo guess who it is? It’s Mommy!” Most of the time she just wants to grab the phone and play with the buttons, which means ultimately she is just going to hang up on me.

Kerry makes is best effort to encourage Roo to be phone chatty and sometimes it actually works. At worst I get a “bye-bye” and at best I get a couple more words, an “I love you” and a “bye-bye”. If Kerry is in a tickling mood, I might even get a couple of giggles. To be honest I don’t care what she says as long as I get to hear her little voice at least once a day.

The thing I don’t understand is that when someone is not on the phone that is when she finds it the most attractive. She grabs it out of the charger, puts it up to her ear, rests it on her shoulder and has a full blown conversation. All to the standard recorded message “your call can not be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try your call again.” Because, of course, she has pressed the “on” button.

She also knows how to use the ringer. In fact she prefers to mess with the ringer, pretending that the phone has actually rung, before she begins her phone chat. This all usually happens when I have turned my back or have walked out of the room and I run scrambling to answer the phone only to realize that Roo has commandeered it for a little playtime. It is like a cruel joke that I should’ve learned the punchline for already, but she keeps doing it and I keep running for the phone.

Growing up we had a Mickey Mouse rotary phone in our family room. My Sister was apparently quite the household troublemaker and into everything. My Mother tells a story about how she caught My Sister in mid-phone call one afternoon. To Japan. To be honest I think it is a family urban legend, but I need to remember to check our phone bill. The one thing I have learned is that chances are that your toddler is smarter than you think they are, or at least smarter than you are ready for them to be.