Sugar Is Sweet, and So Is Sophie

You know how, when you join a new group of some kind, the leader will often start off with a question for everyone to answer in their own way -- an ice-breaker, they call it -- to help people warm up toward one another and get them comfortable interacting together. Sometimes the questions are easy enough to answer:

What's your idea of a perfect holiday/vacation?
What's one goal you’d like to accomplish during your lifetime?
If someone made a movie of your life would it be a drama, a comedy, a romantic-comedy, an action film or science fiction?

But the one that always throws me is this one:

If you were an animal (or fruit or car or ice cream flavor), which one would you be and why?

It's a good question, but I'm always in a panic about what to say. I'd do better if I could think about my answer for a while, and usually in those ice-breaker sessions you're expected to come up with something right away. Oh, the pressure! In front of people! To come up with an answer! That doesn't make me sound as geeky as I really am!

In junior high Spanish class, the first thing we all learned was how to ask someone what their name is. ¿Cómo se llama usted? The literal English translation is, "How do you call yourself?" Mind you, Sophie is still working toward using English. My consolation is that Jack didn't really talk until he was nearly three, but when he did it was in complete sentences -- and he's been talking nearly non-stop ever since. So I'm not particularly worried. Plus, I happen to know that Sophie uses rather complex grammatical construction -- she has full-length conversations with herself -- it's just not in a language I can understand.

In Sophie-speak, banana is "dub-dub," baby is "bah-poh," sorry/excuse me is "haw-wee" and Signing Time is "Ih-Ih". (Nope, I don't get that one, either.) Mommy is "Mama," Daddy is "Dada," Jack is "Tack" and Sophie is (drumroll please...) "Sheh-gah".

It must be nice to be so un-self-conscious! But why deny the truth, you know?