"Dono uta wo utaitai no?"

Which song do you want to sing?

The Pumpkin Princess likes for me to sing to her on our way to day care. She always knows exactly which song she wants me to sing. The trouble is, she does not have a large enough vocabulary to tell me exactly which song she is in the mood for. So I'll sing a few bars until she goes "iyaiyaiyaiya" (nononono) and then sing a few more bars of another song until she goes "iyaiyaiyaiya" and so on until I find the correct song that she will wave her arms happily to.

She knows quite a few baby talk words now. She'll say "wa-wa" for dogs (wan wan is how dogs in Japan bark, the way English speaking dogs will bark bow wow. And can you believe I just typed that? "English speaking dogs." Hee!). Trouble is, foxes and even cats are "wan wan". She'll point to the butterflies in her picture books and say "toto" (She wants to say "cho-cho", which is Japanese for butterfly). Of course, bees and other miscelaneous insects are also "to-to". "Pan-pan" is when she wants bread (pan is bread, I understand it's a variation of the French word for bread, pain), or donuts or the Pumpkin Granny's homemade chiffon cake. "A-pa" is her pronunciation of "Anpan-man", a Japanese cartoon hero. Actually, she calls all the characters in that cartoon "A-pa".

She's starting to differentiate between Winnie the Pooh and Anpan-man, though. Which is a good thing, because one is a bear and the other is a bread with a sweet bean paste filling. I'll explain later, as the Pumpkin Daddy is out of the bathtub and it's my turn to wash off the day's worth of grime.