It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

A brief conversation I had with Lennie while going to the drive-through ATM today:

Lennie: Daddy, the bank is sort of like our house.

Me: How’s that?

Lennie: Well, it has bricks like our house.

Me: Do you think it has beds like our house?

Lennie: Yes, probably so.

Me: Do you think the money sleeps in the beds?

Lennie: No, money does not have mouths or eyes, so it does not sleep in beds.

Moby Dick has long been one of my favorite books. It’s part adventure story, part whaling encyclopedia, and it’s just good prose, dramatic, poetic stuff. It’s something of a precursor to things we see today like the fascinating and entertaining show The Deadliest Catch, which details the mechanics and the drama of fishing for crab on the Bering sea. If you like the latter, it may be a misstep to dismiss the former.

When Lennie was still in utero and we were trying to think of ways to let her hear my voice, I thought of reading Moby Dick to her. It doesn’t matter what words you’re saying, but matters only that the child can hear you. Also, though it’s one of my favorite books, it’s one that Mleeka never read and has never had any interest in reading. Our effort fizzled thanks to a lack of enthusiasm on her part (as I recall it; it’s possible the book just put her to sleep).

This past Christmas, I got a radically condensed, cartoon version of the book (not to be confused with the comic book version I got for my birthday), the idea being that it was something I might share with Lennie. To be honest, the book isn’t that great. The drawings are pretty crude, and though the book hits the high points of the plot, it’s just not the best sort of thing to read with a kid because of the way it’s laid out. But a few weeks ago, Lennie developed on her own a very keen interest in having it read to her. Probably a dozen times or so now, we’ve glossed it at bedtime. I don’t bother reading the words so much as pointing to pictures and telling Lennie the names of the people and explaining that the whale and Ahab are grumpy. Now she tells me these things. She can identify on her own the characters Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Queequeg (volunteering the names of the former two). And of course, she knows the white whale’s name and that the sailors wield harpoons on their hunt for him. She can also tell the difference between the pictured right (or baleen) whale, and she’s close to being able to volunteer that the right whale has no teeth but has baleen instead. She’s very interested in the ouchies that appear on Moby Dick’s flank (bright red ribbons of blood trailing behind), and she understands that Ahab (who she knows has a peg-leg) is grumpy because Moby Dick bit his leg off.

And finally, as of this weekend, when we get to the page on which Moby Dick is first sighted from the crow’s nest, she’ll say in a theatrical voice that I may be responsible for having helped her develop for the purpose, “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow-hill!”

Mleeka refuses still to read even the abridged book with Lennie, and I consider it my duty to raise a little fanatic to exact revenge, which is, after all, one of the book’s core themes.