When Lewis considers the heavens, he sings, “Bingle, Bingle, Liddo Dow.” This, being translated, is the first line of Twinkle, Twinkle. He does this whenever he runs across something that looks to him like a star, be it a heavenly body or a starfish.
He loves to sing, and can be found at odd hours singing random phrases tunelessly, such as “Hooooly, hooooly,” “A-B-C,” “Holy Ghost,” and “Hallelujah.”
At night Lewis prays for his Uncle Andrew and Aunt Blessin’s.
That little thing on your tummy? It’s called a bally-bettin.
“Weenh! Weenh!” still means “what is this?”–as it has for months. The etymology is uncertain, but the meaning, unmistakeable.
Lewis has two favorite books: one is his “truck” book, and the other’s name I have forgotten, because we know it by “Read! Bees!” It’s the one about the bear that tries to find the bee hive while being tailed by two geese and three mice, and they all end up in a pile of trouble.
Lewis punctuation is of interest. For one thing, he puts an exclamation after each word, like this:
“Dump! Truck!”
“Want! Read! Bees!”
“Want! Lap! Please!”
“Drink! Want! Please!”
These sequences can occur in almost any order, but once begun they are repeated indefinitely, as in “Drink! Want! Please! Drink! Want!…”
One pair of words that sticks together without punctuation between is “fly-‘gin.” Lewis loves to “fly again,” which means sitting on Daddy’s lap and playing with the flight simulator. Peter has had the demo version for a couple of weeks now, such that it shuts down after five minutes of play–thus the origin of “fly-‘gin.” But I got him the full version for Valentine’s Day; and this morning I found Lewis sitting resolutely on his lap, flying-‘gin, and here’s the funny bit: his eyes were drifting closed every two or three minutes because the engines were putting him to sleep. He wouldn’t leave, though. Asleep or not, he still wanted to fly-‘gin.