It's long been a family tradition to embarrass one another with less-than-flattering stories of our childhoods. Spend just a few moments with my mom's family and you will be told that she was breast fed until what we now refer to as the 'tween years.
"Mom used to take her behind the door," one of her brothers will boast. "It just didn't seem right with her having a full set of teeth and all. Especially since some of them were permanent!"
She swears this story isn't even true. However, the one about her coming out of the water only to have her swim top fall off is. Again, though, there's some disagreement as to exactly how old she was when this happened. She swears she was only six or seven while others argue she was old enough to draw stares.
It's not always the kids in these stories who are made out to be the boobs. Tricia enjoys telling the story of the time her mom ran over her arm in the driveway. I like to remind my mom of the time she put an entire jar of vaseline in my hair for Halloween. It took three full bottles of vinegar to get it back out.
Of course, a number of the stories tend to involve the kidspeak mispronunciations of childhood. When I was little I used to call shampoo "pamshoo", airplanes "mertmanes", and - much more common- spaghetti "pisghetti." Harper used to call oatmeal "opinope." Muluken, much older but still very new to English, often confused the words "understand" and "stand." This was quite problematic when he told his first grade teacher "I can't stand you."
One of my favorite kidspeak stories happened just a few days ago. Having not worn a tie for three years, I decided to throw one on for school last week. When I came downstairs I was greeted by quite a collection of odd looks and questions from the kids. They were much more amused than impressed. Not long after we got to school, Ty was wondering through the Gathering room when he came across another male teacher in our school who was also wearing a tie. With perfect comedic timing he looked up at Mr. Foote and declared...
"My dad's wearing the same costume today!"
Great little language stories. I especially like your placement of the word 'boobs' in this piece. Freudian 'slip'? If we lived with our writer's notebooks I bet we'd catch a bunch of these - every day. Not every one as hilarious as Ty's costume remark though.
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