Why My Kids Won't Be Child Actors

Over the last few weeks, Norah's "vocabulary" (I use the quotes because she says very few actual words, but she's at least saying things that she THINKS are words) has really started to blossom. Just about everything we say to her, she tries to repeat. And don't even get me started on her ability to remember character names on the TV shows she likes. It's a little creepy, really. She can point at minor characters and identify them, even on shows that she's only seen a couple times (like Spongebob--she even does the "Oooooooohhhh" that starts off the theme song--though, again, she's probably only seen the show a half dozen times over the last year).

But probably the cutest thing she's started doing is having conversations on her little play phones. Again, I hate to stereotype, but when these things happen at such an early age, it's tough not to assume that certain things are just hardwired into the female psyche. Like talking on the phone. She loves it. And Gabe really only started pretending to have actual conversations on the phone sometime in the last six months or so.

There are a couple of adorable things that she does--and I tried, in vain, to capture any of them on video this morning. The first one is to say "Hello," ("hello" is one of the few words that she has nailed now) then, apparently, when the person on the other end doesn't respond, she'll say "HELLO!" like an embittered old person who isn't at all comfortable with the technology she's holding in her hand. The second one starts, again, with "Hello." After that, she'll babble nothing in particular for a few seconds as if she's having a conversation. Then she'll say "OK," as if finishing up the conversation, and put the phone down.

Both are pretty cute and I tried to coax her into doing one of them for the camera this morning.

She refused. But I did manage to get a few minutes of her just being kind of cute and then grabbing a marker and doing her favorite thing in the world--writing on the windows. At this point, we've simply given up on keeping them clean. If we know someone is coming over, we'll give them a wipe down (the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, by the by, works WONDERS for wiping off crayon and marker from walls and windows--not so much from cloth though, sadly), but, otherwise, we just leave them be.

Anyway, there was a point to the title of this post. I've noticed over the past two years of posting on this blog that my children have a complete lack of ability to follow my basic instructions before I start filming. Gabe's lack of directability has been evident since the early days of our playroom theater, but I had held out hope for Norah. Today pretty much solidified in my mind the fact that neither of my kids is destined to be the next Cousin Oliver from "Brady Bunch." Actually, that might not be such a bad thing.

Before filming, I handed her the phone and said, "Say 'Hello' and talk on the phone," which seems like not only a pretty straightforward request but a simple enough one. She spends at least an hour of every day walking around and talking into the phone as it is, so it's not like I was asking her to do something she wouldn't normally do anyway. Yet, she barely cooperated. So long money we could make when our kids play a character like Luke Brower from "Growing Pains" (for those of you who don't waste your valuable brain space on pointless television and movie trivia, this was the homeless child character the Seavers took in towards the end of the show's run. Unlike Cousin Oliver, though, the actor who played Luke Brower went on to become Leonardo DeCaprio, the famous Prius driver.)

Sorry these videos aren't terribly interesting. But, you know me. I'd rather post something that isn't very interesting than post nothing at all.