Communication breakdown

Communicating with a 2 year old boy is an experience akin to speaking English to someone who speaks Swahili. Not to brag, but my little guy has better than average communication skills for his age, not by any wonderful-speech-therapy-mommy methods of my own, but rather out of his own cleverness and need to make himself heard. Nevertheless, he still has his moments. Today, while trying to usher the littles outside for playtime, Caleb just insisted that he needed to bring his ball outside. "No problem Buddy," I replied, "which one?"
"My ball"
"Ok, which one Caleb?"
"The bally-ball!"
"What bally ball?!"
"The round one."
"...(Stunned, stifled-laugh silence)...Can you be more specific?"
"The one that bounces!"
"Ohhhkayyy, that's closer to helpful, but they all bounce... just tell me which ball you want... do you want the tennis ball?"
"NO!"
"The Basketball?"
"NO!"
"What color ball was it? Wait a minute... you call everything purple... let's see... was it the one with Buzz Lightyear?"
"No! The one that goes in the street!"
"THEY. ALL. DO. THAT!"
(four minutes of frustrated guesses later...)
"Let's just look in the toybox for it" We shuffled thru the toybox for about 5 seconds before he noticed the same foam basketball that he was looking at 5 seconds before this all started...
"Der it Is! I got it Mommy!" and off he trotted happily outdoors.
As I shuffled outdoors, bitterly I thought of all the wonderful things I could have done with those 5 minutes of my life while trying to sort out what my adorable little imp was wishing for ;) Reminds me of an old skit I loved of Abbot and Costello...


Abbot & Costello Who's on First by jwj