O is 4.5 years and has an endearing pattern of speech. In some ways, it’s genuinely wrong, as in his use of “-ded” as a past-tense suffix to present tense verbs: “I already knowded that!” In other ways, it’s close-but-not-quite, as in “when you told me I couldn’t have ice cream, you cracked my heart, Mom.” And finally, presumably because we live in a house disproportionately overrun with Y chromosomes, it’s a little fuzzy in terms of the grasp of female pronouns: “is that sher bike?”

Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in his use of similes. I started keeping track of a few because I found them fascinating — both because these are things that are interesting enough to him that he wants to comment on them, and because the things he compares them to are so wildly unlike the subjects themselves.

1. A piece of popcorn is “like a squid”
   
2. A Cheeto is “like a star wars ship docking”
   
3. A Cheeto (same meal) is “like a meteor”
   
4. A cloud is “like a bear”
   
5. He likes my hair because it’s “like a rainbow!”
   
6. My water (filling from the refrigerator unit) is “like a sonic ball jumping over and then speeding away”
   
7. While learning how to work with a partner to fold a large blanket into halves, he excitedly announced that the trick was “you have to make it like a giant squid”

From the mouths of babes, as they say. Evidently if you look hard enough, many things around you are akin to squids.