"For my daughter, elevators were 'uppy rooms.'"
April 11, 2019 10:51 PM   Subscribe

Kids:
My friend’s 5-year-old just saw a crow and called it a “Halloween eagle.”
Also kids:
He's 8 now, but when my son was 3, he stood in front of the meat section at walmart and said "Ah, the future of us all."
(Pleated Jeans, ad blocker recommended)
posted by Johnny Wallflower (83 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
When my son was:
5 he described his mother as a 'bubble of disorder'.
12 he described the life of his academic parents as 'begging an boasting'.
Nailed it.
posted by drnick at 11:19 PM on April 11, 2019 [31 favorites]


Second link:
"Life's a waterslide where you die at the end."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:21 AM on April 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


I will have to wait until morning to look at these on my laptop because something, perhaps the ads or perhaps the million Twitter embeds, makes it impossible to scroll the first article past the first anecdote on mobile. Ugh.
posted by limeonaire at 12:24 AM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


He once whispered into my ear, age 4, "in blood world everything is made of blood".
posted by EndsOfInvention at 12:53 AM on April 12, 2019 [52 favorites]


EndsOfInvention, careful, once a kid is aware of the blood world, it's just a matter of time until they're chanting Blood for the Blood God, and mumbling about skulls for the Skull Throne.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:23 AM on April 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


He HAS been drawing a lot of skulls recently and talking about his new friend "Corn" (sp?) a lot.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:34 AM on April 12, 2019 [18 favorites]


Kids Say The Darnedest Things

It is apparently impossible to link to any of the old Art Linkletter show without somehow Bill Cosby being involved. Dammit.
posted by hippybear at 1:46 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


My youngest kid's first joke (when we was about 4):
What do you call a sheep with no eyes?
A dead sheep.
posted by pipeski at 3:16 AM on April 12, 2019 [16 favorites]


My eight year old told me the other day: ”Sometimes it hurts to exist.” And I was just like, right on babe, me too.
posted by fancyoats at 3:57 AM on April 12, 2019 [42 favorites]


My 3-year-old observed me nursing their baby sibling and solemnly declared: "You are a dual-udder cow!"
posted by evilmomlady at 4:00 AM on April 12, 2019 [53 favorites]


My kid's first pun came at the age of three, when she was sweeping with her tiny kid's broom. She turned to me, put her finger to her lips and said, "Shh! I'm trying to sweep!"
posted by Miss Cellania at 4:07 AM on April 12, 2019 [60 favorites]


Pizza bones
posted by sallybrown at 4:35 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


My 3 year old niece saw the suits of armor in the Royal Ontario Museum a few weeks ago and breathlessly pronounced them "Ghosts"

Which like, yeah!
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:00 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


My own contribution to the “kids are creepy” zeitgeist.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:05 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


So, wait. This is a listicle that ripped off another listicle (which is, in turn, just recycling other people's content)? Sigh.
posted by schmod at 5:31 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


My baby brother once announced, out of the blue, at a fairly young age (4/5ish) that "people who are slammed in the throat, die with their eyes open."

25+ years later, we still use that in the family as a thing to say when you're about to say something and then the thought vanishes from your head.
posted by halcyonday at 5:34 AM on April 12, 2019 [17 favorites]


When my son was 3 he once pointed up the stairs and told us about the Lady Who is Hiding Upstairs.

WE STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT
posted by Fleebnork at 5:36 AM on April 12, 2019 [36 favorites]


> My eight year old told me the other day: ”Sometimes it hurts to exist.” And I was just like, right on babe, me too.

sometimes it hurts to exist? oh, kid, you're so close to right.

I was in the grocery store the other day when a kid (maybe 9, 10?) suddenly loudly announced "I am a totally real human being!", which is I guess either a bold announcement of the rights of children or else something that a swarm of spiders disguised as a human would say.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 5:46 AM on April 12, 2019 [48 favorites]


I was speaking with a small child who was pushing a heavy object. "Good for you, what powerful forearms!" I said, or something similar. The child turned to me angrily and said, "I do NOT have FOUR arms!!!!"

We did sort of kick that around a bit - what would you do if you had four arms? (Hold more cats!) Does this imply a world where everyone has four arms? How would the arms be distributed on the torso? Etc, etc.
posted by Frowner at 5:50 AM on April 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


After a bath I was trimming my 3 year old's nails - he replied "Don't take away my defense!"
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:51 AM on April 12, 2019 [44 favorites]


Eldest used to call robins 'robin redchests'.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:58 AM on April 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


My young nephew saw some smokers and asked, "Why do those people stand around with those steam sticks?"
posted by newmoistness at 6:04 AM on April 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


When my oldest was in second grade, I asked him why he didn’t like to talk about school. He gave a knowing sigh and said “Because it’s all just a bunch of nonsense.”

Smart kid, that one.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:06 AM on April 12, 2019 [32 favorites]


We did sort of kick that around a bit - what would you do if you had four arms?

You'd be ready for anything, since four armed is forewarned.
posted by zamboni at 6:33 AM on April 12, 2019 [29 favorites]


Our five-year-old son, looking wistfully out the window of the car in the back seat : "Dad, infinity can't stop."
posted by colossal at 6:38 AM on April 12, 2019 [18 favorites]


We dropped our almost-3-year-old off with neighbors so we could go have dinner. Right as we knocked on the door, he looked at us like he wanted to go out too and said, deadpan, "But that was not my plan."
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:08 AM on April 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


You'd be ready for anything, since four armed is forewarned fourwarned.
ftfy
posted by evilDoug at 7:32 AM on April 12, 2019


When he was about 4 or 5, my oldest observed to us: "I'm so glad you two mated."
posted by nubs at 7:38 AM on April 12, 2019 [21 favorites]


Jeez, when I was three I just flushed oranges down the toilet.
posted by Quindar Beep at 7:48 AM on April 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


When my preemie twins came home from the hospital my son was 3 and had been obsessed with a book about skeletons, where each page has a picture of one and then you turn the page to find out which animal it came from.

One day he looked across at his sisters and said quietly, "When they die there will only be very tiny bones."

No one else thought this was funny, probably mainly because one of them nearly had died a couple months earlier, but I thought it was absolutely hysterical. I said no, sweetie, they're going to get bigger! Like you! And he said, OH! and had this look of dawning comprehension and it was amazing.
posted by gerstle at 7:51 AM on April 12, 2019 [49 favorites]


I grew up calling pizza crusts 'pizza bones' and legs 'getaway sticks', in both cases because that's what my dad told me they were called. I suspect a lot of the linked content was similarly influenced.
posted by davelog at 8:03 AM on April 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


In re death: The small child of my acquaintance was talking about death and how her mother and grandmother would probably die soon. (Mom is young, grandmother is a very youthful and vivacious 52 or so and both are in good health.) So I reassured her (with limited effectiveness) that this wasn't very likely and asked her why she thought it was going to happen.

It turns out that her mother had said, while in the throes of a migraine, "oh, I feel so sick, I feel like I could just fall over and die" or words to that effect. And her grandmother had said, one day, "Oh, I'm so stiff, I feel like I'm ninety, I am LITERALLY ninety right now" or something similar.

I was able to reassure the child about the migraines, but I was not able to convince her that her grandmother wasn't ninety. I suggested that she double-check at the next visit and said that I was sure grandma wasn't ninety, but she has learned that "literally" means "this is an actual thing that is real", and refused to believe me.

The moral of the story: You can teach your child that "literally" is a funny intensifier or that it is emphatically not a funny intensifier, but be sure to keep your usage in line with what you teach.
posted by Frowner at 8:07 AM on April 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


DFM500 JR, age three:

The flap on the back of your sweatshirt? That's a "hoog".

When you have your head, hands, and feet on the floor, and you push yourself over? That's a "Tumble-sault"

When your diaper has been on for a long time, and you're all red and irritated downstairs? That's called... "Diaper Crash".

He also once said that he could not sleep because his toe nails were growing.
posted by dfm500 at 8:13 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


We have a big ex-Naval base in town, with a bunch of buildings that are being (slowly) redeveloped for our late capitalism hellscape. To do something with the buildings in the near term, and increase the site's profile, one of the development authorities did an admittedly cool installation last year, having an artist come in and put tentacles all over one of the buildings.

My husband took the kid down there to see it last fall, and it apparently left a big impression on his brain. It's been at least three months, but a couple weeks ago, while being driven around, the now-almost-three-year-old suddenly piped up from the back seat and said, out of the blue, "I'm still worried about that octopus."
posted by joyceanmachine at 8:13 AM on April 12, 2019 [26 favorites]


My sunny-dispositioned little one never said anything creepy, but I do remember her first joke. She was whatever age it is when you learn how to make a sentence, and said, "No trees get me!" And thought it was so funny she laughed and laughed and said it again. The idea that these huge living things couldn't run after her cracked her up.
posted by kozad at 8:23 AM on April 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


Whe I was 4 or so, I apparently announced with great solemnity, "Time comes by and earthquakes happen", which so charmed my father that he typed it up on a 3 by 5 card that was stuck in the slats of the kitchen door for many years.
posted by tavella at 8:30 AM on April 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


My daughter (5.5yo), who is unusually concerned about being defecated on by birds, warns us to watch out for "sky poop".
posted by fricto at 8:44 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


My 5yo daughter set up a little phlebotomy lab in her room to care for her stuffed animals and when I made some remarks on its impressive authenticity she told me I was being "creepy" and she only wanted to "hear the word 'blood' like, once a day."

It was her phlebotomy lab!
posted by potrzebie at 8:54 AM on April 12, 2019 [38 favorites]


My 3 year old was obsessed with and adored ceiling fans but was weirdly skittish about the oscillating tower fan in our bedroom. One morning he rushed by it, climbed onto our bed, and said solemnly, “The stand-up fan is watching you.”

Another time I was starting another doomed attempt at Couch to 5K, and my husband asked if I was going to take the kiddo out in the jogging stroller. I responded, “Ha ha!” Henceforth, our eavesdropping child referred to the jogging stroller as the “ha ha stroller,” mocking my repeated running failures forever.
posted by Maarika at 8:55 AM on April 12, 2019 [12 favorites]


Shortly after starting kindergarten my daughter made a cardboard sign that reads:

LET THE MADNESS OUT
IN FRONT OF YOUR TEACHER

Words to live by!
posted by prize bull octorok at 8:59 AM on April 12, 2019 [22 favorites]


When my little brother was 3, he dumped all the ornamental glass marbles my mom kept in a jar on the bathroom sink into the toilet. My mother got very upset with him and told him to sit in his room and think about what he'd done. He told her "I will not! I will think about fire trucks!"
posted by ChuraChura at 9:02 AM on April 12, 2019 [66 favorites]


Me: “What do you want for breakfast honey?”
3 yo: “Freedom.”
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:03 AM on April 12, 2019 [39 favorites]


Some of these ideas stretch credibility a bit, but I have to tell you about the story of juice puppies.

When a friend's small child was around 2, perhaps barely 3, years old, and he was learning that some words for specific things sometimes applied to other things in general, every liquid was juice. Water was juice, juice was juice, a shake was juice.

At the same time, any creature was a puppy. Dogs were puppies, cats were puppies, elephants and guinea pigs: puppies.

One day they were watching a TV show that had dolphins. He proclaimed happily that they were juice puppies.
posted by tclark at 9:07 AM on April 12, 2019 [24 favorites]


> Shortly after starting kindergarten my daughter made a cardboard sign that reads:

LET THE MADNESS OUT
IN FRONT OF YOUR TEACHER


your daughter is hyphy af.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:10 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


My middle child when he was 3 told me that he was so sad he had "eye saliva."

Tears. He meant tears. And for some reason knew the word "saliva" but not "tears."

My oldest child thought a chrysalis was called a "kill" for a while and this made for some very strange conversations.

(Now if you'll excuse me my 2-year-old is pretending to give birth to a baby that is a ball of tinfoil and apparently I am the midwife.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:31 AM on April 12, 2019 [16 favorites]


After I was typing on our computer I went to play the piano, which my then 3YO daughter called the compiano.
posted by M-x shell at 9:31 AM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


> (Now if you'll excuse me my 2-year-old is pretending to give birth to a baby that is a ball of tinfoil and apparently I am the midwife.)

if you get a chance pretend that the tinfoil baby shouts "WAKE UP SHEEPLE" right after it's born
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:33 AM on April 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


Me and Mr Catseye couldn’t agree on the name we’d use for the jolly red-suited white-bearded figure who brings presents at Christmas. He grew up with ‘Santa’, I grew up with ‘Father Christmas’, much ongoing discussion ensued, during which our then 2-year-old started calling him ‘Reindeer Man’ anyway.

The same kid is now 5 and does a good line in morbid and/or creepy. Recently when watching me hold her baby sister: “Mummy, she is smiling! I think she is happy. I think she thinks she will last forever. But nobody lasts forever. Everybody dies. Don’t they? Everybody dies.”
posted by Catseye at 9:46 AM on April 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


Adjacent: when I was about 4 we had one of those Little Tikes turtle sandboxes. Since they were made out of hollow plastic, ours filled up with water during the spring, like inside the lining. I asked how the water got in, and my dad said, "Probably the rain." Around that time, we were visited by an old family friend, Loraine, who had shown up on a drizzly day with a big black umbrella and wearing a beige duster-style raincoat. I definitely heard her name as The Rain and got it in my head that she was a demigod like Santa or Tooth fairy, who went around causing gray weather and depositing water in impossible places.
posted by es_de_bah at 10:12 AM on April 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


My daughter who was very upset with her mom about something demanded to know "why did you marry that woman??!"
posted by dubwisened at 10:18 AM on April 12, 2019 [19 favorites]


When he was 4, my son's response to his first encounter with an oyster: Slime Chicken.
posted by thenormshow at 10:27 AM on April 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


I'm inadvertently raising a little materialist.

He goes to a preschool that's part of a church school, and they do church things: learn about Cheeses [sic], read bible stories, do a Christmas pageant.
So the other night he asked to pray before going to sleep.
OK.
"You go first."
So I think about a good thing that happened today and say thank you, and think about a bad thing that happened and say what I'm going to do to make it better or not have it happen again. [I'm new at this]
"Now me.":
Dear God,
I wish you were real, and you were here with us. Because then I could see you. But you're not real and I can't see you. Like Cheeses, who isn't real because I can't see him. Thank you.
Another time he fell over a small piece of playground equipment, and ran over to me, hollering.
"What's wrong?"
"I fell down and hurt my .... my .... my...-" he thrusts his arm out. "My hand ankle!"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:34 AM on April 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


A lot of ads, tabloid crap, endless links to other "recycled" content, and twenty-seven times kids failed to come up with anything as good as "Roll of Inches" or "Horse Tornado."
posted by Wolfdog at 10:41 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


Little Caxton, age 5, en route to school: "squirrels are probably my third or fourth least favorite animal but I don't know why I just said that."

Pretty sure he was trying to foreclose the follow-up question already forming in my head.
posted by Caxton1476 at 10:55 AM on April 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


drnick: 12 he described the life of his academic parents as 'begging an boasting'.

holy fucking shit.

Meanwhile, I don't have any regular contact with children, but I do have Twitter where I can see Pamela Ribon tweet about her child being dramatic about being too sick to go trick-or-treating:
“This sickness. My sickness. The good parts and the bad parts of me are breaking into pieces. And I feel like the good is leaving and the bad is staying.”
posted by mhum at 10:55 AM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


Words from my older kids:
- dump dozer
- the sport of 'baskethoop'

Two stories from my youngest:
- Learning about types of sentences very early in first grade (declarative, exclamatory, etc) and the teacher asks the new student to give an example of an interrogative: "What is wrong with you people?"
- Next year he's at Holy Thursday mass, people are lining up for the veneration of the cross (essentially go kiss the cross before Easter) and the ushers are holding this cross with a lifelike, mostly naked Jesus covering most of the cross that you'd really prefer to be dealing with. He looks down the aisle, looks back at me and says "So what are my options?"

I think youngest siblings get quite a bit of alternative parenting from their brothers and sisters that makes for a far less predictable upbringing. I say that as a good thing since I like my kids, by and large.
posted by Cris E at 11:18 AM on April 12, 2019 [8 favorites]


Ok, when I was in kindergarten I came home and my mother asked how was school today. I said, "Shitty" "What did you just say?" "Shitty", I replied again. Just then the phone rang. It was my teacher. All I heard on my end was "Oh my lord, I am so sorry." It turns out I was having some bowel issues and my mom gave me some laxative the night before that did nothing so she gave me a little before school. I spent the entire morning in the classroom bathroom shitting my little brains out. I even had to change into the extra set of underwear and pants we all kept in school just in case. This was break glass emergency. My mother, to the day she died, was so apologetic about it. Out of the blue she would apologize for giving me so much laxative even 30 years later. She did one day a few weeks later ask me how I knew the word shitty. "I heard you and dad say it after you came home from the movies." Kids hear. Kids know.
posted by AugustWest at 12:10 PM on April 12, 2019 [9 favorites]


Little Purr has picked up my go-to phrase of frustration, so lately we've been hearing "Are you KIDDING me?" in a little preschool voice. It's also funny when they're doing pretend play, and the phrase doesn't quite fit the situation they're modeling.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 12:46 PM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


My then 3-year-old son used to refer to crab rangoon as "Chinese tacos."
posted by zakur at 12:58 PM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


At some point I read the Hobbit to my wee ones. Shortly after we started, I overhead one of them in play with his Darth Vader & somebody else action figure going "Join the dark side"/"I said Good Day, sir!" which had me laughing for quite a while.
posted by nubs at 12:59 PM on April 12, 2019 [12 favorites]


My nephew, at about age 4, informed us that, "animals that don't sleep at night are called 'not turtle'".
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 1:04 PM on April 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


For a couple of summers where I was energetic, we grew a tiny garden of pumpkins, corn and tomatoes. Little Gyre quite enjoyed getting fresh corn out of the garden. Once the bounty was over, we were discussing what to have for dinner one cool fall day, and I mentioned that we had some canned corn in the cabinet. His reply, "No thanks, I don't eat city corn."

Eleven years later, canned corn is STILL "city corn" and corn on the cob is "country corn."
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 1:38 PM on April 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


I work for a beverage manufacturer with a line of juices. One coworker's child renamed pineapple juice. It will forever be known as "not apple" around the office.
posted by MuChao at 1:56 PM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


My child, age about 3, went with us to a seafood restaurant. While waiting for the meal, I took him on a tour. We looked at the big tank of live lobsters. "Grasshoppers," he stated, confidently. Our meals arrived, including a lobster for his mom. "Mommy . . . eating . . . grasshopper?" She said it put her off a bit.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 2:23 PM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Mommy . . . eating . . . grasshopper?"

No, no, little one!   Don't be silly, Mommy's not eating a grasshopper.  That's a giant sea spider.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 2:54 PM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


Camping will always be known as "tenting" in my house after my then 4-year old daughter called is thus. "Momma, can we go tenting again?"
posted by crayon at 3:05 PM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: just recycling other people's content)? Sigh.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:09 PM on April 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


my younger daughter and my sister have plenty of funny things I can remember:
handcuffs were and still are 'jail hands' in our family.
A basketball was a 'hoop shooter'.
A saguaro cactus is the know nothing plant, because it looks like it shrugging.
My dad was not "not Bill" for a while. Bill is my wife's father.
For every joke they'd try to make up themselves, the punchline was "cause he wants to eat ya".

I once asked my little sister how music played on the radio in the car. She thought about it for a while and decided that tiny people were in there playing the songs. Makes sense.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:23 PM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


My son called Duplos “uppercase Legos.” And his friend saw an oil slick on the street and said “oh look, a dead rainbow!”

My daughter comes up with some great ones, but she knows she’s got the word slightly wrong, and furrows her little brow until we can work out together what she means.
posted by Liesl at 5:03 PM on April 12, 2019 [14 favorites]


My partner, devoted thank you note writer, had my son write a thank you card to his great aunt and uncle for their gift of a copy of Minecraft when he was six. It featured a picture of a Minecraft pig on fire and a misspelled Thank You.
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:51 PM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


My nephew was very excited about an older friend’s first communion. Turn out nephew (3) thought he was getting his first chameleon.
posted by CMcG at 6:48 PM on April 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


I was flying from Sarasota to Boston about two years ago after dealing with some stupid, stressful, elderly-dementia-father shit. I was in group E, the last group, and a mom and dad and 2ish lad and 4ish lass were right ahead of me in the line at the gate. The kids were loud and bouncy and I was depressed and tired and so ready to be home and not in Florida. My little inner voice was growling GRR STUPID KIDS RUIN EVERYTHING.

They got to the gate agent who took their boarding passes and asked the little girl "is this your first ride on an airplane?"

"NO."

"Oh. you've flown before?"




"I'M NOT A BIRD!"

Made my day and put the whole trip in perspective.
posted by vrakatar at 7:02 PM on April 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


My brother, when we were quite young, came home one day and asked my parents what '"derful" meant. Mom asked him to repeat the word, and he said "derful." Dad said "That's not a word."

My brother was always hesitant to ask my parents anything about reading and words, because he wasn't a big reader and was always behind in reading skills, but he got very indignant about "derful." He said "It's on the store! It says "derful" on the store!" My mother said, "Which store?" and my brother said "The ice cream store!" Nobody got anywhere except frustrated, and the subject was dropped.

Until we were all in the car together, and we drove past a Baskin-Robbins, which sported a sign with their early-'80s motto: "Thirty-one-derful flavors" and my brother was pointing at it and shouting about how everyone who told him it wasn't a word was WRONG!

My family has described any food we like as "derful" ever since.
posted by tzikeh at 7:45 PM on April 12, 2019 [9 favorites]


My son called Duplos “uppercase Legos.”


I LOVE IT
posted by Hermione Granger at 9:02 PM on April 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Juniorcheesetree-isms:
“Unicorn” = “cornhorse”
“Excuse me” = “skew mees”
posted by threecheesetrees at 5:37 AM on April 13, 2019


This'll warm your cockles. It was around the Christmas Holidays. I was shopping at the local Dollar Store, when I overheard two children listing the people who they needed to buy presents for Christmas. They're excited and over loud. The younger sister says, And we got'ta buy something for Santa. The older corrects, We don't buy presents for Santa, Santa buys presents for Us! <3 I can only imagine what was the younger child's vision of the holiday before that moment.
posted by xtian at 6:31 AM on April 13, 2019


None of these are exactly wordplay, but my daughter used to make hilarious cards for people. Once, I think she was 7, she had a friend over whose dad (whom she barely knew) was having a birthday, and made him a card that said "You are the best dad ever!" She also made me a valentines card that had a giant gun on the front saying Fallout, because I was playing the game at the time.

My son (7) is fond of the macabre. The other day he asked if we could crash the car (just a little) to see how the airbags worked. He also stated on the way to school that if he gets cancer he hopes it's arm cancer.... so he can get a robotic arm and build a watergun into it.
posted by DTMFA at 1:18 PM on April 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


> The older corrects, We don't buy presents for Santa, Santa buys presents for Us! <3 I can only imagine what was the younger child's vision of the holiday before that moment.

GIFTS FOR THE GIFT GOD
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:26 AM on April 14, 2019 [3 favorites]


Cereal and milk used to be 'breakfast soup'.
posted by Catbunny at 8:42 AM on April 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Cereal and milk used to be 'breakfast soup'.

Oh, let's not start that again.
posted by tzikeh at 9:43 AM on April 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Froot Loops = Dessert Cheerios
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:15 AM on April 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


My younger child is an unending font of these. Many Mefites have heard many of these stories; among my favorites are the time he yodeled in a sort of sprechstimme recitative, “Mom, did you know that everything in the whole world is a shape? Your foot is a shape, and this bread is a shape, and the doooooor is the same shape as a graaaaaave” and “this is how a nosebleed happens. First you get a tiny little hole in the skin on your face? And then your whole skull bone caves in.”

But my absolute favorite is when he was maybe three or four and he was sitting on the arm of my husband’s computer chair — like, both feet on the seat, back facing out at 90 degrees to the chair’s back — and using his feet to kick the chair around. He overbalanced and fell off backwards, a straight drop of three feet into a hardwood floor. There was a HUGE thwump sound, followed by silence.

Every parent of a daredevil child knows the dread that silence will instill, and so I rushed over to him, frantic, to find him flat on his back with the wind knocked out of him, struggling to inhale. When he finally pulled in a breath, he looked at me with his eyes full of tears and said quaveringly “Mom?”

“Yes, sweetie, what is it? Are you ok?”

“Mom, I … I don’t think I survived.”
posted by KathrynT at 12:28 PM on April 14, 2019 [10 favorites]


I love these!
When my daughter was 18 months or so, she brought me my new iPhone saying, "It said Donder Du."
Made no sense to anyone else, I even checked that my older daughter didn't add a weird ringtone in secret. Days pass, I get a text and baby points at my phone and exclaims, "Donder Du!"
Her interpretation of the default Apple text message alert.
Ten years later, it's the only way to let someone in the house know they got a text message.
posted by drinkmaildave at 8:55 AM on April 18, 2019


« Older I HAVE A JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINATION AND I THINK...   |   The Most Interesting Man In Baseball Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments