A typical exchange between Noemi and her father during or after reading a book or two (when he's not replacing every noun in the book, much to her exasperation, with the noun phrase "bees in cheese"):
"The words on the page don't sit still," Dad insists.
"Yes they do. They don't move even one bit."
"The words on the page poke and pet."
She rolls her eyes, scrunches her tiny shoulders.
He persists: "The words on the page poke and pet. Poking words poke, petting words pet."
When she's done howling at the poking words in her ribs, she makes her final statement: "They don't pet or poke; they don't poke or pet."
Dad gives in for now. Mom doesn't want her daughter too agitated at sleep time.
On his way downstairs, Dad still wonders why he hasn't convinced her that hugs need food to live, and he's never accepted her answers to these (and countless other) questions: If noises don't have mouths, how do they eat? If noises don't eat food, how do they stay alive? (she's so logical, she says that people make noises.) Why are trees afraid to show us how they walk? Why does she say furious when he says fur-ious? How did all those bees get in the cheese?
--first blogged August 2004