quiet/loud

Two things you must know in order to appreciate this story: one, Lucy is obsessed with dogs. She has that toddler gift of spotting a dog at a hundred paces, on a leash, in an advertisement, going by in a passing car, and she remarks on all of them. She does not seem to have any trouble with the idea that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same kind of animal, and I can't discern any preference for one or the other. They're all dogs. Uuf uuf. Two, there is a little white dog who lives next door to Lucy, and this dog excites much interest, especially since she can sometimes see him from the window of her living room. You'll catch her peering out the window, standing on tiptoe to get her little chin clear of the sill for a better view. Frequently our conversations on the matter go like this:
"Are you looking for the dog, Lucy?"
"Uuf." [signs DOG]
"Where do you think that doggie is?"
"Homa." [signs HOME]
"That's right. The dog is in his home."
Last Tuesday I looked over to see her standing at the window for the third time in an hour. "Whatcha doin', Lucy?" Without taking her eyes off the yard, she signed WAITING.

***

"Has she been playing the game where she gives you nothing?" Adam asked me this morning. Apparently, one of Lucy's new things has been to go down the hall and pretend to pick up the light from the digital readout on the carbon monoxide detector. Then she'll deposit the light in your hand, proclaiming "Ta ta." Lather, rinse, repeat.

She did this several times at top Lucy-speed, bolting down the hallway in her staggering run to grab at the light and place it carefully in my open palm, laughing. (On the cuteometer, this is at least a seven out of ten, edging into the eights when her laugh turns into a chortle.) The one thing this game had not taken into account, however, was the reset/test button, located a mere centimeter or two below the glow of the display.

I can now say definitively that Adam and Chelle's carbon monoxide detector works.

Lu is a pretty laid-back kid. When the piercing shriek of the alarm screeched through the hall, she didn't cry. I thought I might, for a few seconds, frantically looking to see if I needed to do something to make it stop. Several earsplitting tones later, it stopped on its own. I looked at Lu. Her eyes were perfectly round. Solemnly, she intoned "Beep beep."
"Yep, it went beep beep. It was quite--" don't say scary-- "alarming."
"Beep beep," she said, a little more certainly, and then signed "All done."

There was no more carbon monoxide detector frolic today. We are all done with that terrible noise, apparently. (Other things Lu is "all done" with: the inhaler she has to use to treat her cough, her last several lunches, donkeys. All done with donkeys.)