No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no more raisins!

The most exciting part about Abbie’s newfound talking skills is I know exactly what’s on her mind. I still have to decipher her mumbling, but once I do, I know exactly what’s on her mind. No longer do I have to guess what she’s thinking during breakfast. “There’s Ian and Tory?” “Hey, a Fruit Ring?” “Pass the op-ed section, I think I see a Leonard Pitts column?” Nope, I now know exactly what she’s thinking.

“No more raisins!”

Abbie gets a mix of cereal in the mornings. She gets Fruit Rings. She gets Crispy Hexagons. She gets Bran Flakes, which I swear she likes. She also gets a handful of raisins.

Recently, Abbie has been picking through her breakfast bowl, pulling out the raisins while leaving the Bran Flakes, which I still swear she likes. After a few minutes, she runs out of raisins, and exclaims her new catchphrase.

“No more raisins!”

She always says it with such surprise, too. It’s like she never expected her breakfast bowl to have a bottom, that it would always have another raisin hiding behind yet another Bran Flake.

Now that I know she’s out of raisins, I can take action. I can give her another handful of raisins. Or, I can ignore her since her exclamation is more of an observation than a demand. She’ll quickly move onto eating the cereal pieces in her bowl, even the Bran Flakes.

It’s encouraging from a language development standpoint to see that she’s applying her catchphrase to other situations. Whenever she runs out of something, she can exclaim “no more (blank)” with the same inflective surprise. The other day I heard her yell “no more fishies” after running out of Goldfish. Those I had to refill, because there’s no way she’s eating something disgusting like spaghetti without a Goldfish chaser.