Playdate Two: 15.5 and 18 Months Old Auntie Raine was doing all the going out things! She was bringing Summer’s cloak and her bag and all of it!
“Wiby?” Summer guessed excitedly.
“No,” Raine told her, “Not today. We’re going to Professor Xavier’s house. I told you, remember?”
That was not the wiby. It was also did not sound like the usual word for the other places they went. She recognised other places, and it was none of them. She couldn’t remember their names to say them though, so she just tried the thing that made most sense to her again, and which she most wanted to be the answer.
“Wiby?” she suggested again.
“Professor Xavier’s house,” Raine repeated. She knew it was too much to ask that Summer remembered that visit from last year, when she’d been too tiny to really know much about anything, but she’d been telling her about the visit they were going on. Apparently the only thing that Summer had picked up was that they were going ‘out’ - or she was just being stubborn.
Summer did not know what that meant. It was very silly and very long. Words, in her experience, were not that long. Park. Cafe. Out. Those were the places they went. Perpepperdabiourdoud was far too much and had no business being a word. Whatever it was, she didn’t want it. She knew what she did want.
“Wiby!” she demanded. They should go there instead. It was definitely better. “Wiby! Wiby! WIBY!” this last insistence was accompanied by throwing herself to the floor and crying, kicking her semi-shod feet
*
Forty minutes later than they were scheduled, Raine and Summer touched down on the lawn of the familiar, to Raine, house. She had eventually got Summer to calm down. She would not accept the suggestion of Professor Xavier’s house but had been mollified by ‘go for a ride on broom broom?’ She had chortled away to herself, kicking her legs happily as they soared through the air, and Raine was just figuring that once she went in and found there were toys, she would be fine with being here. She hoped.
“Sorry,” she apologised to Professor Xavier, “Hello,” she smiled cheerfully at Dora with a wave. Turning her attention and her tone back to adult-mode, she continued, “When we started getting ready, she,” she gestured at Summer, “thought we were going to-” she hesitated, fairly sure it would be unwise to say it in front of Summer. There was a thing some parents at their groups did where they spelled words out loud when they didn’t want their kids to know what they were talking about. She didn’t dare try. Which was stupid. Because she saw that word multiple times a week, and she should have been sure but now she was trying to think of it she couldn’t make it stay still or remember whether there were two ‘r’s’ or three or where they went, “-uh, her favourite place,” she supplied instead, hoping the hesitation would just pass for doubting whether she should say it in front of Summer, “And when I told her we weren’t she had a screaming meltdown. I hope it’s still okay to bring her? How are you?”