I Ha' Dat!

Though you can't tell it from that picture, Mace is really suffering from allergies this week (and Heidi, so sorry, but I tried to get your kids to look at the camera when I was taking the picture, but they were so excited about actually being inside a Mario video game that they couldn't be bothered to turn and look at the camera -- you would think that being children of a real photographer they would have developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of a camera's lens cap being pulled off and would automatically turn to face the camera, but apparently that's not how it works). On Sunday afternoon, he was feeling pretty poorly so we sat on the sofa together and watched Holmes on Homes on HGTV.

In case you've never watched the show, Holmes is a contractor who fixes botched/unfinished jobs other contractors screwed up. It's great -- he walks around a house, pulls down a bit of drywall to see what's back there and suddenly the homeowner is getting a brand new kitchen with granite countertops. The episode Mace and I watched on Sunday involved a new septic system, fixing a crawl space underneath a house, and re-doing a bathroom (all done wrong the first time, of course). I didn't realize until about ten minutes into the show that Mace was transfixed by this show -- he'll watch TV so long as the channel is on Nicktoons, Sprout, or Disney, but he typically doesn't watch other adult-geared shows -- well, with the exception of Cash Cab, which really makes no sense 'cause it's not like he knows the answers to the cabbie's questions and the scenery in the cab never changes. But I digress.

At some point during Holmes on Homes, Mace started interacting with and relating to the activity onscreen:

When Holmes used a drill, Mace said, "I ha' dat."

When Holmes brought out the ladder, Mace said, "I ha' dat."

When Holmes was using big buckets to move dirt around, Mace said, "I ha' dat."

When Holmes used a crowbar to tear out some 2x4s, Mace said, "I ha' dat."

After a few minutes of this completely one-sided dialogue, I realized what Mace was saying ("I have that") and doing -- my two year old was letting me know that he and Holmes were exactly the same -- so long as you were judging by the tools.