Technical vocabulary

I am not the first (or most sensitive) person to note that traveling with a toddler offers a set of special challenges. Susan handles almost all of them, true, but I have noticed.

But the advantages are much greater! Going down the street with Mirella in Italy is like an instant ticker tape parade. I know, most people assume I'm her nonno, but that just makes it so much sweeter.

I've had the good luck to work in foreign countries a few times. In each case, you tend to learn some technical terminology, even if you hardly know the language at all. So, for example, I can say "watch out for the fork lift!" in several languages, or "gross weight or net weight."

Being here with Baby Girl has given me a rich new technical vocabulary that I would likely have never learned otherwise. A partial list:

- High chair
- Little chair that improbably attaches to a table, reminding one of those California stilt-houses that you know intellectually but never quite believe are safe
- Car seat
- Diaper (example: Italian mother helpfully pointing out that my daughter, in my charge for the moment, has most of hers around her left knee and nowhere else)
- Many flavors of yogurt
- The milk foam used to make cappucinos, which BG loves to eat with a teaspoon
- Teaspoon
- Bib
- Puppy
- Bunny
- Reindeer
- Duckling
- Playground
- Snowman
- Little flap thing you lift up in a pop-up book
- Cap
- Toddler
- Precious
- Slide
- Miniature train
- Token

. . . and

- Proud father (of all my three girls!)