When we were up in Connecticut we asked Nicky what he wanted to be when he grew up. I asked him if he wanted to be a lawyer like his Grammy…
“Yeah,” he said.
“Do you know what a lawyer is?” I asked.
“Yeah, lawyers have armour and weapons like an army and they do battles with the bad guys,” he said.
We sat around puzzled for a minute. Then it dawned on me…
“I think you mean ‘warriors’ sweetie,” I said.
“Yeah! Warriors. I want to be that.”
When my daughter was about 2-3, it was the fall of the year, and she had been playing outside. She came in holding a feather she had found by the bird feeder. She held it up proudly and said, “I found a bird leaf!” (That struck me as a pretty good description from someone who didn’t know the word “feather”.)
Out driving with my son who was about 3, and we passed where a bank was being built. I asked if he knew what a bank was, and he said sure. “A bank is a place you go to buy money” which is about as great a description of loans and credit cards as I can imagine.
On a plane flight out of Charleston, once in the air, my little girl looks at me and ask, “Mom, is this heaven”? That little girl is 22 now and when I think of that I still get tears…
Me and my son were driving around from car lot to car lot, looking for a new car, and he was getting a bit tired of it all, and wanted to find a resturant. I told him that we would stop after one more lot. But then, on the way to the resturant I saw another lot I wanted to stop at,and told hime “we’ll go after this one, I promise”. He sighed,and said “Is this because you have ADD?”
I almost wrecked the car I was laughing so hard.
My son was sitting in his second grade class. They were discussing how people and animals breathe in oxygen. My son (who reads alot) already knew where the teacher was headed next. He raised his hand and said “I know what plants breathe…”
“OK, Avraham, what do plants breathe?” the teacher asked.
“HYDROGEN PEROXIDE!”
The teacher told us it took everything she had to keep from cracking up on the spot.
When my oldest was about 3 there was a commercial for plastic wrap that featured slow motion footage of melon balls and the like being poured onto the sheet of wrap and then bouncing off. One time during the commercial she exclaimed “Look, dancing fruit.”
But the most choke-up thing she ever said was when Mrs. Kunilou was in the hospital for several days. I smuggled my daughter upstairs for a visit and she hugged her mommy and said “do you remember me?”
My 3 yo has been waking up and waving bye bye. I finally asked him what he was doing and he said “I’m waving bye bye to the me in the mirror”. There’s a mirror by the bed.
This was really significant as it was a full sentence (he’s got major speech delays) and it further adds fuel to my rejection of an autistic dx for him. Recognising that the kid in the mirror was there and wasn’t him was really major
I was irritating my 3 year old daughter by poking at her every time she walked by my chair. I must have gotten on her nerves because after about the 5th pass she wheeled around on her heels, held up her fists and said (loudly) “You want a piece of this?”. I 'bout fell out of the chair laughing.
During Desert Storm my son was about 5. I was trying to explain to him the concept of war. I said something along the lines of “When the leaders of countries cannot agree on something they consider important, sometimes they will send in their army to fight a war”. My son said “Lotsa people die in wars, don’t they Dad?”. “Yep”, I responded, “they sure do”. He said “Why don’t we just shoot the leaders instead?”. I still don’t have an answer for that one.
