Many years ago we had a small boat that we used for skiing or fishing on one of the many lakes near us. My husband had our then 5 year-old out on the boat as they took a leisurely ride into a town across the lake.
Boaters have customs like bikers - they wave when they pass one another. As my husband steered down the channel he would do the wave thing and was a bit flummoxed that folks would start to wave and then stop.
He looked behind him to the seat where the young’un sat. As a boat would pass son enthusiastically flipped them the bird.
Husband: What are you doing?
Son: Waving.
Husband: That’s not waving.
Son: Well that’s the way the big boys do it at school.
A couple nights ago, I wanted our son to go to bed so I could get a few minutes by myself. My son was getting ready for bed, but he’d been in the bathroom for a long time, with the water running. So I headed toward the bathroom, only to find my son sitting on the sink, looking all surprised at the faucet. I was feeling kind of impatient and asked him what he was doing there. He said,
“Mommy - it’s the craziest thing! I was sitting here, swimming with my penguin, when a huge crane came and lifted me into the sky and set me right here! I don’t know what happened!”
The whole time he’s saying it with this inflection my husband gets when he’s telling him tall tales (one particularly memorable one is the forest of the long nosehairs, but I digress). I snorted and had to leave because I was laughing so hard. Guess you had to be there.
Ah yes. I have a video on my cell phone of my three-year-old singing “Five green bottles, hanging on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall…”. When she got to “one”, guess which finger she’s happily shaking at the camera. That’s a keeper.
Yesterday my son walked by my husband and I as we were hugging each other. He looked over his shoulder at us and said, “Good job on the hugging, guys.”
Son (not sure if it’s the five-year-old or the ten-year-old. Probably the ten-year-old, but it’s funnier if it’s the five-year-old): My nose is stuffy. I hate it when my nose is stuffy.
Dad: Yeah, there’s nothing worse than a stuffy nose.
Son: Well, there’s testicular cancer.
Older Grand-daughter was nearly 3 when she asked to be taken to the ‘digger park’. So my daughter, baby in the stroller, Older GD and I all got our coats on and went for a walk. The digger park has toy vehicles on big springs, and was a fun place to play. ESPECIALLY on the bulldozer.
On the way, we stopped off at a sandwich shop for a drink. Older GD had just begun to figure out how her family members were related to one another and to her. I couldn’t finish my drink and asked her if she wanted it. She did, so I, thinking ‘fruit juice’ added my drink to hers (she had a Snapple bottle).
Please try to imagine frosty, sarcastic disdain - she said to her mother,
“You Mother REAL useful! First of all, you don’t put your drink in someone else’s. And second of all, you don’t CHANGE UT!” [Guess she didn’t appreciate the new flavour].
We howled, which, of course, didn’t do anything to jolly her up.
I take the two-year-old daughter to and from nursery on the tram, which is pretty much door-to-door but involves travelling during rush hour. On the way home last night she wanted to ride on my shoulders, and as we pushed onto the overcrowded tram with the (empty) pushchair we got some grumpy looks from the commuters about the chair until Daughter, still perched on Daddy, grabs two of the overhead straps and says “Swing like a monkey! Ook ook ook eek eek!”. She then loudly regales the car with an improvised verse from “Wheels on the Bus”: “The monkeys on the bus swing back and forth, back and forth…”