This happened to a friend of mine. She’s about 13 years older than her brother, and she used to take care of him when their mother was working. One day, when he was about six, she took Richie to MacDonald’s, and was holding him in her arms while they waited in line. He casually asked her, “Sissy, can you put me down, please? You’re crushing my penis.”
This apparently shocked the woman waiting behind them, who looked at him in complete horror. Richie followed up by looking back at her, and saying, “Penis, penis, PENIS!”
My dad’s family grew up near San Bernedino in the desert after the Korean War. They lived on a ranch, and were somewhat remote. One day when my uncle Danny was about five, they were at the local market getting groceries when Danny saw the first black lady he’d ever seen. He started getting excited, pointing at the lady, saying “Mommy, mommy, look at that lady!” Grandma shushed him and told him it’s not nice to point. They continued shopping, when Danny saw her again “Mommy, it’s that lady again! Look at her!” Grandma told him to quiet down and mind his own business. When they finished shopping, they got in line at the check-out, and as luck would have it, the black lady was right in front of them. Danny got really excited this time, being so close to her. “Mommy, mommy! There she is again! Look at her!” “Quiet, Danny! I told you it’s not nice to point.” “But Mommy, she has the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen!”
My parents rented a video camera to record my twin sisters’ first birthday party. Mom set it up in the living room to record us kids (at the time, two (my younger sister), four (me) and five (my brother) wrapping their presents. At one point, among other things said and done on this tape, I turn to my mom and say “Mommy, I know dere’s chwistmas twees, but why isn’t dere birfday twees?”
Later in the video, during the ‘party’, my two year old sister is seen looking shady, eyeing my parents, and then the camera pans a bit until she’s out of range. You then see her arm dart into the field of vision, swipe a cookie from the plate, and dart back out. The camera pans back to her again, and she’s looking around to see if anyone’s noticed, and breaking pieces off the cookie to eat. As the story goes, Mom and Dad had to keep telling her to stop eating cookies, and she never did figure out how they knew she was stealing them.
My wife and I took our daughter to visit a castle here in our area (West of Frankfurt, Germany) about six weeks ago - about one month before our son was due to be born. We were climbing around the ruins before going into the restaurant in the rebuilt part for a snack, and I picked up my daughter (two and one half years old) and put her on the stump of the outside wall (this is not dangerous as the wall is about four feet thick and I had my arms around her) of the castle keep. She looked out over the valley below us and the river and the villages and the fields and forests, and she turned around and looked me in the eyes and said “That’s life down there.”
Another one.
This happened to a friend of the family.
The family had been on a long car trip/vacation. Their youngest daughter Katie (nicknamed Katie Scarlett, due to her attitude toward being served) was about 4. Katie’s father carried her little suitcase in from the car and set it down in the hallway and then told Katie to take it upstairs to her room. Sometime later, Scott saw the suitcase was still sitting in the hall, and yelled for Katie. She came down and Scott said, "I’ll help you carry it to the stair, but ** you** have to take it upstairs.
Stamping her little feet, Katie picked up the suitcase and started up the stairs, about mid-way she paused and turned to her parents, “THIS IS NOT HOW MY LIFE IS SUPPOSED TO BE!”
My daughter (4) and son (2) were fighting the other day, in the afternoon, at a time that we thought they could both use a nap.
My son hits my daughter, and she starts to cry. We say to her, “Maybe it’s time for you to go to sleep.”
She says to us: “What happens when Dad hits Mom?”
We were both shocked, and said, “what are you talking about, Dad doesn’t hit Mom!”
She said, “Just pretend that Dad hits Mom. What would you do?”
She then continued, “Mom, you would cry. And it wouldn’t be because you were tired. It would be because Dad hit you. You wouldn’t want to go to sleep. So I shouldn’t have to go to sleep because my brother hit me.”
The neighbor boys (3 and 5 years old) at the old house would come over alot. Mostly to play with the dogs. One day when I was coming home from work the older one was sitting on a blanket in his side yard. He saw me pull up, and came over to talk to me. As I get out of the car he says
“Hi Rue, I’m naked.” And he was.
“Does your Mom know?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah.”
“O.K.”
Then he tells me about playing in the creek. It was really hard to keep clothes on that kid.
Soupo says alot of odd things, but I’m around him all day and it just doesn’t register any more. That’s just the way he talks…
He was in the middle of an “acting up” phase, and he did something to get himself in trouble.
“You’re not being very good today.” I told him.
“Well, you’re not being very good, either.” he said as he turned away.
He just didn’t get the “under your breath” part of “muttering under your breath”.
He wanted something, a truck maybe, and we weren’t going to get it for him. “I’ll just wait and ask Gramma, then.”
He was out grocery shopping with his Grandmother.
“Gramma, I want a peach.” (He’s really good at picking out produce, by the way. It’s his gift, good produce picking.)
“Do you like peaches?” Gramma asks, a bit skeptical.
He draws himself up to his full 32", and says in his most dignified voice, “Actually, I do.”
My 3-year-old neighbor Josh comes over sometimes to play with my son. The two of them were playing catch in our yard a couple of days ago, and I noticed Josh wore his mitt on his right hand. So I asked him, “Hey Josh, are you a lefty?”
He replied immediately and indignantly, “I’m not a lefty, I’m straight, you homo!”
Holy shit. I had no response to that. I’ve wondered since if I should mention it to his mother. I know that if my son said something like that, I’d want to know, but his response was so quick that it makes me wonder where he got it from, you know?
One of my mother’s stories about me that I cannot confirm or deny, having zero memory of the event, being around the time I’d started talking heavily.
My parents had a family friend named Kitty (the woman exists, that I can confirm). Story was, mother was at the grocery store, me in tow (or rather, in the seat of the shopping cart), and by one of those mild “small world” coincidences, Kitty appears either in the next aisle, or behind us, or ahead of us or somesuch. Enthusiastically, I point and yell (still having difficulty with exact pronunciation of things), “Titty!!!”
Apparently she was wearing a halter top at the time, which made it all appropriate.
One of the oddest things lately was listening to an “Hour of Slack” from The Church of the SubGenius, a segment where one of the Hierarch’s children giving discourse on the nature of God.
“And my bicycle is God…and Krogers is God…and the store is God…and you are God…”
Of course the adults in the background were encouraging him on: “Yeah, your bicycle’s God, that’s right…yeah, the grocery store’s God too, absolutely…”
And the tyke wound up his discourse with “I don’t think I can talk anymore cuz my feet are tingling.”
It fit in very well with the rest of the usual oddness of the show.
Holly’s story about her articulate and disabled son reminded me of this one about my articulate and disabled daughter. Dori has cerebral palsy and this happened when she was around 3. At 3 she was so small that I often didn’t bother with a wheelchair or stroller for her when we were shopping. I would carry her to and from the car and then plop her into a cart in the store. On this particular day we were shopping at a K-Mart that had set up posts around the front door so that the carts couldn’t be pushed into the parking lot. No big deal usually, but on this day I had bought pillows and had a huge, bulky (although not heavy) bag to shlep to the car. SO I got the bag settled in one hand and then wrestled Dori out the the cart and settled her in my other arm. This took some juggling, as she was – and still is – rather stiff. She was cooperating as best she could, but a passing lady must have thought she was struggling. The lady said, “Aren’t you ashamed? A big girl like you, making Mom carry you? Why don’t you get down and walk?” I just smiled weakly and would have walked on, but Dori (who has spoken very clearly and precisely since age 18 months) piped up, “I can’t walk! I have cerebral palsy!” The poor lady walked under the door into the store!
Many moons ago, on a flight to Labrador with a co-worker and her little girl, age four. Most of the flight was people returning from early fall vacations down south. There was much grumbling from the tanned vacationers about the early snow already on the ground as we descended from the cloud deck on our approach. A four year old voice pierced the entire cabin: “SNOOOWWWW! Mommmy, look at the SNOW!”
The Field Museum, Chicago. Inside the big Shawnee (?) earthworks building replica. Giving my feet a rest by sitting a while on one of the faux Buffalo hides, next to a young family. A budding anthropologist, maybe five years old, carefully contemplates the building, its architecture, its accoutrements. Then he turns to his parents and asks, “Yes, but where did they watch the TV?”
My sister is a Kindergarten and Grade 1 teacher. She hears more of these in one afternoon than the rest of us put together. Like the little girl who came to class in a brand new dress that she hadn’t worn to school before. “I know it’s rude, Miss… but I look good today.”
Yeah yeah, I’ve told this before, but it’s still funny (at least, to me). My sister listened to this following exchange between her children:
Jamey (6): Do you want to know what is the saddest thing?
Aubrey (4): What?
Jamey: Eddie’s grampa got squished by a truck and now he’s in a wheelchair all the time.
Aubrey: Oooohh… is he flat?
Ha ha ha ha! And this one isn’t so much funny cute, but the last time they all visited, Aubrey piped up from the backseat of the car:
“Wendy, do you know what I wish?”
Me: “What, Aubrey?”
Aubrey: “I wish that all the strawberries in the world grow on my house!”
She proclaimed this with such delight and enthusiasm, it was irresistable. And a darn good wish, too.
I was 2. My folks were having a big dinner party, lots of their friends over. They sent me to my room to get ready for bed. About 2 minutes later, I came running back into the living room yelling “Look everybody, I can take off all my clothes!” Whatta you know, I was right.
My friend Howard and I were at work when his wife and son came by to take him to lunch. While we talked a little before they left, his 2 yr old son Jake was exploring the area and spotted a beetle crawling on the concrete and walked up to it. Howard told him it was called a bug. Jake looked down at it, waved, said “Bye, bye bug”, and stomped it into a grease spot. I thought I was going to die laughing.
My nephew used to combine words in interesting ways. The floor in the kitchen was made of magnolium instead of linoleum. Deer and cantaloupe play on the range. I remember one time when he was 4 and my sister was changing a baby she babysat he said ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but a woman has to change diapers’.
My stepdaughter (6) calls me ‘Stepdad’ at all times. I’ve gotten used to it, but a lot of people think it’s funny. She also tells people I am a vampire because I sleep all day and go out at night (because of my work schedule).
