Smarter than the average goldfish

Tonight we visited Alex's babysitter Tina. He LOVES Tina. She lives up a steep hill, so when we drive up a hill, he always asks "Tina?" hoping we are going to visit. Whenever he is pretending to call someone on the phone, it's Tina:

"Umm....Nina? Yeah. Ummmm.....Yeah. OK. Hmm-hmmm. OK. Yeah. Bye"

This is really how his phone conversations go. It makes me wonder what I sound like on the phone if this is his imitation of me.

Anyway, we visited her tonight and she had a couple of little toys to send home with Alex. She doesn't do her home daycare anymore and is cleaning house. So every time we go over there, she sends a few more things home with us.

Tonight's additions to our already toyful home were a little telephone (which made me laugh--it has a cord and is attached to a big base--Alex has two little play "cell phones" I don't know if he'll know what to do with this big clunker!) and a little dog. The dog goes with a bus that she sent home earlier--you know, the kind of toys were all the little characters have the same shaped holes on the bottoms so that they can all sit happily on the bus seats without falling out when they go over the couch, off the table, etc.

Tina says to me "This goes with that bus I gave you guys last time. I found it after you left."
I say something casually back like "Oh, that bus, OK."

Alex fell asleep on the way home from Tina's. He woke up an hour later and came out to play. He started to play with that little bus and then he walked to Dan and said "Doggy?" with his arms up in the pose that means "Where is it?"

He remembered that he was supposed to have a new dog to go with the bus. I was impressed but at the same time frightened. When your kid starts to have an understanding, not to mention a memory that is actually better than that of a goldfish, you are in trouble. It has been to our great advantage that we can sneakily hide things and then "disappear" them (hmm...that kinda makes me feel like the Godfather or something), with no real consequences. Alex has certainly remembered things and asked for them later, but these were usually more like "fixtures" in his world--playdough, paper, crackers, etc. Not something that he overheard once and didn't even get to play with or hold at them time. We are going to have to be more careful about what we say!