Sto bano

Sometimes Sofia likes to play with the strangest things. For example, one of her games in the morning is to go into our bathroom, pull out our scale and take it to wherever we are. Then she'll carefully set it down, stand on it and watch the needle sway back and forth. Sometimes she'll say "Ooooo"; other times she'll just point to the needle and begin blathering excitedly. I'm not certain where she learned this behavior (*cough* Pegs *cough*), but it's awfully funny to watch.

This morning Sofia pulled out the scale and ran with it to our bedroom. After showing me proudly how much she weighs, she picked the scale up again and ran with it to the kitchen to show Pegs and Yia Yia. Let me point out that this isn't a particularly large scale, but considering that Sofia is only three feet tall, it looked a bit like an ant carrying a grasshopper at a brisk trot back to the colony. After Sofia proved to Yia Yia and Pegs that she still weighs less than some housecats, Pegs told her to put the scale back in sto bano (the bathroom). Sofia ran with the scale back to the bathroom, and after a few seconds started to whimper and whine.

I was in the bedroom getting ready for a jog, and Pegs asked me to go check up on her. "She probably pinched her fingers under the scale when she put it down and can't get them out," she said. I walked into the bathroom and found Sofia valiantly trying to lift the scale above the rim of the tub, struggling and crying out with her effort. You see, the Greek word bano can mean a lot of things: "bathroom", "swim", and as everyone else had clearly forgotten except for Sofia, "bath". When Pegs asked her to put the scale in sto bano, Sofia took her literally to mean that she had to put the scale not just in the bathroom, but in the actual bath. As a result, she was desperately trying to lift the scale above her head and drop it in the tub, an act that looked remarkably like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill in Hades.