Adventures in language

Life with a three year old is never boring. Just eating supper can be a learning experience.
“Dad, the fish doesn't know we're eating it!” I was told, I suppose I have Spongebob to blame for that.

Fortunately my three year old is very competitive. The eight year old claimed that she felt sick and needed to eat only chicken soup instead. The six year old agreed to eat salad, green beans, and French fries, but boycotted the fish. These displays of civil disobedience only pured on the youngest of three sisters. She raced through her tilapia with uncommon gusto.

“I'm going to eat you now, fishy, okay?” Apparently even though the fish are unaware they were being eaten, Annamarie wanted to make sure hers knew.

She's just as proud of how she is the only of the three girls who likes deluxe pizza, as opposed to just hamburger. Although I'm not sure why she thinks this is an important way to win her parent's attention and approval. “Daddy, Daddy, I LIKE MUNCHrooms!”

While we're working on it, she doesn't know many of her letters yet, she can just about recognize her name. She found a bicycle license plate that I'd gotten her and knew it was hers. When we asked her how she knew it was hers, hoping that she'd recognize the abbreviation of her name, “Anna,” she explained, “because it has two 'A's in it!”

A little over a month ago, in a concerted effort to lose weight and get healthy, I gave up regular coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper. Caffeine stimulates your appetite. But I recently read that if you really want a soda, you should stick to clear ones, rather than colas because they have less phosphoric acid. So after lunch, I cracked a diet 7UP and had it in a glass of ice.

This seemed to unnerve Annamarie, because she began asking me if I felt okay. “No, I'm not sick, I feel fine, why are you so worried, sweetie?”

“Because you're drinking 7UP” In our house, tiny amounts of 7UP is the only thing you're allowed to have in our house when you're trying to recover from stomach flu.

“Oh no, honey, I'm okay” I tried to reassure her.

“Then don't dwink that, it will MAKE you sick!”

Then there are those times when it's your job as a parent to teach your children important lessons. When the sweet corn came in at my in-laws, the whole family chips in to pick, shuck, cut, cook, and can. It's quite a process. The magnitude of the volume of produce is more than enough to impress any three year old. When her grandpa parked his pickup in the shade for us to all sit down and get shucking, she surveyed the payload in awe and exclaimed “Oh my GAWD, what a lot of CORN!”

I tried to calmly admonish her that we choose not to take the Lord's name in vain in our family.

“Don't ever say that, Annamarie, that's like saying a bad word.”

“Why”

“Well, because God doesn't want us to use His name that way.”

“Oh, okay, well, um, what CAN we say? Can we say 'holy cow,' is that okay?”

“I suppose so, that or something like 'holy buckets,' you mom used to use that one a lot.”

So for the rest of the weekend, whenever anything was the least bit impressive, she'd exclaim “Holy buckets-of-COWS!”