The Everyday

[After malaria and the flu, we are finally on our feet again getting ready for school (we'll start Labor Day Lordwilling) and easing back into the 'everyday' things, like this blog entry that I drafted 2 weeks ago...]

Sometimes I hate ‘inside jokes’ don’t you? They seemed designed to leave someone out of the fun. Well, I don’t want to leave you all out of the fun of our three budding comedians either. I suppose Kent and I have a couple jokes originating from different films (i.e. “good times, noodle salad!” from As Good As it Gets), so why should it surprise me to see the kids doing the same? Here are a few of the everyday jokes that you would probably hear around our table were we still ‘in the neighborhood’:

“Is that the question Mike was asking?”

The first time Joel, age 4, watched Monsters, Inc. the movie he thought that Sully and Mike were great and made sense of Mike Wasowski: ‘Mike Was-asking’. I’ll grant that it’s a difficult name. Once we noticed this, Kent started to weave this phrase into normal conversation, which the boys found hilarious. Can we go to the fair Dad? Is that the question Mike Was-asking? Months later the joke still makes them laugh, and what makes US laugh is that they start weaving it in on their own.

Are they budding linguists?

Is that the question Mike was asking? =)

“I keen’t stan ‘im!”

One of our favorite movies is Singin’ In The Rain. Each of the kids has their favorite scenes, but for whatever reason the Dictation Coach teaching the leading lady, Lina Lamont how to pronounce her vowels in a more becoming tone is Anna’s fave. They go back and forth practicing one of her lines, “Ah cahn’t stahnd him! I keen’t stan ‘im! Ah cahn’t stahnd him! I keen’t stan ‘im!” Well, Anna (being in the midst of first language learning right now) especially enjoys playing with her vowels and she and Kent go back and forth with these alternations. What has become funny is that now if Kent says this phrase with low vowels, she’ll reply with the high vowels. If he says it with high vowels she’ll reply with the opposite. He’s even switched back and forth and she follows “I keen’t stan ‘im!” Her ‘k’s are still ‘t’s, so she says something more like “I teen’t tannon!” Of course, she has no idea what it means… yet. We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

“Bad & Bom’

I blogged a while back about James’ alliterative make-believe ‘T’ language, which morphed into a variable consonant language of any English consonant or consonant-cluster. After her brothers asked for a ‘trink of tilk’ at the dinner table, Anna, who refuses to be left out of anything remotely funny, starts speaking in ‘B’ language! She’s only just started to make sense in normal English! Her favorite song right now is ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain”, and it is quite the sight to see her try to sing it as ‘Bo bell it on the Bountain’! Today at lunch I got, “Bom, ban I bave bilk Bwease?”

Kent turned to me and said, “You’re the Bomb!”

Guess that makes him B-B-B-B-Bad. =)