Tonight, after the semi-regular bath ritual for my 2 year old, we were getting her dressed in her favorite orange Halloween t-shirt. (Yes, Halloween was 2 weeks ago. But you have to pick your battles with a 2 year old. And no, I still haven't posted the picture of her in her costume. But she was the cutest one at the party. Take my word for it.) She points at the t-shirt, and says 'Misdon buh dah fome.' Now I've gotten pretty fluent in Ella-speak. She's actually quite the conversationalist. But this one was beyond me. 'What's that dear?' 'Mison buh dah fome.' 'Hmm. Still not getting it. What?' My darling two year old literally sighed and said very slowly and more loudly 'Mis. Don. Buh. Dah. Fome.' Suddenly, she has instinctively reached for "I'm speaking to a foreigner" to get her message across. Do I look French? The part that really irritated me was that my bride immediately knew what she was saying: 'Miss Donna bought that for me."

(Bonus points for getting the movie reference) I recently sent out an update to my European user base at work, detailing all the progress we've made over the alst 120 days since I moved over. To ensure it reached the full audience, I asked members of my team to translate it into German and Italian (our other two principal languages at Chiron). One of my translators sent back the translation along with a comment: "In German, we would not use so many words." That was the most polite "you talk too much" I've ever heard.

Last night, while carving jack o' lanterns in fine American tradition (Halloween's not nearly as popular here as in the States), I slipped with the knife, cutting something I didn't mean to (not flesh, fortunately). Frustrated, I said "shit!" before carrying on. Not five minutes later, Giuia dropped something in the other room, provoking her to use the same word. Our precocious not-quite two and a half year old walked around the rest of the night giggling and yelling "Shit!" at random times. Oh that's going to go over really well with her teachers at school tomorrow... I'm going to let my bride explain this one to the grandmother next time they see her.