Is it wrong that my toddler's quirks of speech make me want to sprinkle sugar on his head, slap some butter on him and eat him up? Perhaps I shouldn't be cheering mispronunciations but he is just so damned cute I can't help myself.

Madalyn's aberrations never affected me this way. But then, there was very little she couldn't pronounce properly. Really the only thing she consistently had trouble with was the "th" sound. She filled it in with either 'd' or, alternately, 'f.' ('That' was "dat" but 'bath' was "baff"). Now, while there was some enjoyment in "fumb" (thumb) and "funder" (thunder) the cuteness quotient was relatively low. Madalyn has never ranked high on the cutesy scale. Pretty? Yes. Intelligent? Of course. Evil genius? Yep, she's got that covered. She's just not a "cute" kind of kid. I don't know why; it's just, out of the long list of complimentary words I could conjure to describe her, "cute" is not one that springs to mind in association.

Now, her brother, on the other hand, is going to give me a cuteness overdose. He can't pronounce 'r' or 'l' so he substitutes 'w' in their place. The next time I hear him talk about "Chicken Widdle" I may well go into sugar shock. The 'st' combination at the beginning of words gives him trouble, too, and he has come up with the very unique 'fw' combo to replace it. If you are annoying him you may well be told to "Fwop it!" And don't even get me started on strawberries. They are "fwahdiddies." I mean, come on! Fwahdiddies. You can't get much better than that. When I hear that I wish someone would invent a time-freeze ray so I can stop him just where he is for a little while longer.