Now that it's auto racing season, Olivia and I are having a good time watching "racecars!" Not NASCAR, but F-1 and (lately) CART and IRL. No, really, there's something about small, shiny cars shrieking around and around a track that really seems to appeal to her not-quite three-year-old attention span. Oh be quiet, Ellen beat you to the "compares nicely with your own" joke a long time ago.

But, like Ellen, I've learned one must be careful which habits are imparted to our self-propelled mimic machine.

We have, for reasons immediately obvious to the females in the family and completely not-obvious to me, a giant dressing mirror in the den. Olivia uses this to dance and preen and practice screamingly funny facial expressions, making her look sort of like Jim Carrey, if Carrey were 3 feet tall and wore clear plastic slippers and a pink tu-tu, that is.

Anyway, yesterday morning Olivia had decided to do a little swirly dance with one of her blankets when on the TV screen behind her a CART driver decided to have himself a little bit of quiet time by bounding over a barrier, spinning the vehicle around twice, and scattering an impressive amount of his car across the landscape*. I said, without thinking much about it, "uh-oh!"

Olivia suddenly spun around, threw her blanket up in the air, shouted in her hyper-cute LittleGirlVoice^tm, "GOD!" then threw the towel down to the ground, "DAMMIT!"

Barely suppressing a smile, I turned away from Olivia toward my left, where Ellen had been sitting typing away on her computer next to me on the couch. The look in her eyes as she stared at me would compare quite favorably to the one her snakes get when she puts a dead mouse in their cage.

"She got that one from you," she said.

Which of course caused me to turn back and say, "Olivia, we only say that when Schumacher or Alonso go out."

"Right daddy... soomahker alanso, right." Then she started making rubber faces at the mirror.

She's actually losing her timing a little bit. Normally this sort of thing is reserved for when A Gramma is around.

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* The quiet time came at the end, after all the "tink tink p-tang tink" sounds had died down.