a budding sense of humor is a beautiful thing

Frances has been playing pretend doctor with great enthusiasm and dedication for about two years now. I have fond memories of walking in the front door after work, my big belly preceding me, to be greeted by: Mama! Let's put some jelly on your belly, sit down! And Frances would run for a tape measure and whatever little object she had imbued with magic doppler essence, lift my shirt, squirt some pretend jelly on my big belly, rub the little object around and listen to the baby's heartbeat, do a lot of serious measuring ... then suddenly, in a brusque, business-like gesture she would yank my shirt back down and the appointment was over. Whew. Now we can get on with our evening! We did this routine every day for weeks. And after Gabriel was born, her doctoring did not subside in the slightest. Check ups, sick visits, you name it.
So it is no surprise that Gabriel, aged 19 months, is an old pro at playing doctor. Well, usually he plays the nurse, and his main duty is administering shots. Lots of shots. I had to have about 17, right in the knee, while I was making dinner tonight. He gets that Frances (wearing an enormous lab coat, handed down from Dr. Hruby Smith, pens sticking out of the pockets with a plastic stethoscope slung around her neck) is the doctor and he is the nurse. He seems to like this set up and as long as he gets a turn with the shot, he's happy. So this evening in the middle of doctoring and dinner-making, Nurse Gabriel starts to get a little loopy. Starts to lean against my legs, in that totally exhausted mood in between laughing and crying (that's what happens by dinner when you wake up at 5 am) and catches my eye and says: NURSE. WANT TO. Okay, this is the verb nurse he's talking about, and it's maybe the only thing that will carry him through given his mood, so I sit down with him. Frances asks if the nurse is ready to see their next patient.
The nursing nurse, you mean?
Gabriel looks up at me and grins. Thinks a minute. Stops nursing to repeat: a nursing nurse! Nursing nurse! Giggles, and then belly laughs, ensue. He tries to keep nursing but he keeps remembering the joke and cracking himself up.
A nursing nurse! Get out of here!!!
Frances giggles. We all giggle. Gabriel has a joke, and he loves it. We move on, past the hilarity. Gabriel tells Papa the joke at dinner. He is so very tired, he sits on my lap and leans his head against me while I feed him black beans all mushy with yogurt and avocados. He mumbles things like: 'Cado. Good. Hug Mama.
Usually when I put Gabriel down in his crib to sleep at night, I whisper goodnight and he snuggles into sleep position in silence while I cover him up and quietly walk out of the room. Tonight I lowered him into the crib and just before he hit the mattress, he reached up and touched my arm and whispered: nursing nurse. I could feel his big smile in the dark.
He is a dear one, that boy. He has found many things funny, and made us all laugh in the past - but up until today his humor was more physical, absurdist. It usually involved placing objects on his head that don't belong there and declaring: a hat! But today he took a linguistic turn, things got a little more sophisticated...it's part of his speaking explosion of recent weeks that has all three of us smiling all the time. What a thrill, to witness this boy coming to language, enthralled by the wonders of words.