<p>I was driving DD to piano when she was about ten. Out of the blue she said, “Mom, Allegra is the only allergy medicine that doesn’t have sexual side effects.” As I was driving out of the ditch, I said, “That’s good honey, but I don’t think that is anything you need to worry about just yet.” Yep, you guessed it. The next thing out of her mouth was: “Mom, what are sexual side effects?”</p>
<p>anxiousmom, my son called trucks the same thing. I’ll never forget him pointing and shouting excitedly (on a crowded city bus), “Big f–k! Big f–k!”</p>
<p>When my D was around 2, we were on the elevator with a neighbor who bore an uncanny resemblance to a storybook character…which one became apparent when my D turned to me and said, “Mommy, that lady looks like a witch!”</p>
<p>I asked my parents about this when I was home tonight. Apparently when my aunt was pregnant with my cousin, she was rather large. I was three at the time. </p>
<p>Well, my mum and I were in an elevator one time with a rather large lady and I said “Look mommy she’s going to have a baby too!”</p>
<p>I guess the lady was mortified. She was not pregnant. My mom rarely took me to the mall with her after that. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How funny! Your D isn’t alone; I have a dear friend who’s a pink-haired Wiccan gothic fashion designer, and when we were in high school, a child at the mall said the exact same thing about her. Being good-natured about how she appears to others, she simply smiled, bared her evil fangs, and hissed. She and the child both laughed hysterically. The mother wigged out.</p>
<p>I have no children of my own, but I corrupted a friend’s two-year-old child a few weeks ago, and I’m sure I’ll be reminded repeatedly up until (and past) the time that this child is a high school senior that <em>I</em> was the one who warped and twisted his small and malleable mind.</p>
<p>We have a close-knit group of friends who is fabulous about moving. We’ll box things up, whisk things away to the new apartment or house, clean the old, unpack the new, and leave the harried new-home-denizens slightly dazed, but all in one piece, and we’ll do it all for a smile and a free lunch. Now that we’re starting to have kids, we bring the kids along to bounce off the walls of whichever apartment’s mostly empty. My brother recently moved into the sixth floor of a midrise apartment building across the street from one of many “flower vendors” on Fannin in Houston. These places are widely known to be drug fronts, and the new apartment looks right down on one of them. I walk into his new apartment for the first time, survey my surroundings as a big sister ought, go over to the window, and in a “how quaint!” tone of voice, I brightly say, “Oh look! He’ll get to watch all the drug deals go down!”</p>
<p>My friends’ two-year-old son bobbles over to the window and brightly says, “Druuuuuuugs!” and everybody laughs until they can’t breathe anymore, except me, because I’ve turned into a horrified shell of a human being.</p>
<p>I need to start a therapy fund for my future children.</p>
<p>aibarr, unfortunately our neighbor was not of the exotic Wiccan variety but of the prominent wart on the very prominent nose variety.</p>
<p>Oh no… Well, that wouldn’t go over as well. Hopefully she wasn’t a real witch!</p>
<p>Were my mother online, she would insist that I share my childhood vocabulary:
Oblibs = olives
Dit-dirs = crutches (my dad had polio as a kid, walks with a leg brace, crutches at night)
Ree-rees = raisins
Ali Baba = my parents insist this was my first word
Peetoo = computer
Geesadada = grocery store</p>
<p>There were more… I was a proliferous word-fabricator (still am), but those were the real classics. Oblibs are still oblibs in our house (and in several other houses in my family), and reerees are still reerees. Going to the geesadada is still used, but only occasionally. My dad switched to titanium crutches instead of wood ones, so they don’t make the characteristic dit-dir creak anymore, so we ditched that term. They are no longer peetoos because we’ve converted to Macs. Ali Baba was not my first word.</p>
<p>When my daughter was about three she was in the car with my husband and father-in-law when they got cut off. She reacted with, “Jesus Christ goddamn poodle dog”.</p>
<p>My D (now a HS senior) was 4 years old and taking a nap. I wanted to get the last of the Christmas shopping done in peace and told my H I would only be gone for about an hour or two. He said “she will be mad if she wakes up and you’re shopping without her.” I told him just to let her sit at the computer and play her games and she will be happy. He asked “how do I turn it on and get her games on?” I said she can do all that, just stack the phone books on the chair so she will be tall enough to see the screen. So I come home and hear talking, I sneak up stairs and peak in the door. She is sitting in husband’s lap and holding his hand on the mouse, teaching him how to play her game. I hear her say: " Click the mouse two times, daddy - that’s called double click. Good daddy, good. You learn fast." Needless to say, my husband is still a computer novice.</p>
<p>POTOmom–so cute! My S was 4 before he was reliably potty-trained, just because he would much rather sit at the computer and play the hockey game all the others were playing. He could read the instruction book, too! </p>
<p>I wrote down (in their baby books) some of the cute pronunciations my kids had, because all too soon they would say the word properly and the babyism would be lost forever.</p>
<p>tawbebby–strawberry
soun tunna me!–sounds good to me!
hecaca–helicopter
bullzuzu–bulldozer
mayrup–maple syrup (we still say this) </p>
<p>I don’t recall exactly what my S said for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” but he loved them and made a pretty good stab at saying it.</p>
<p>And my D, who is 26, is due to give birth to her own cutie any day now! 
:)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You just reminded me – my S called them Teenager Newton Ginger Turtles.:D</p>
<p>And as long as we’re getting scatological here, I’m reminded of an embarrassing restaurant visit when S was about 2 or 3. He had been kind of sick all day with diarrhea but was feeling better that evening so we went to a little neighborhood restaurant for dinner. The waitress came over to the table and greeted him with “How are you doing, honey?” and he looked up and smiled at her and loudly proclaimed “I have donnarhea!” Of course, it sounded exactly like he said gonorrhea. We were mortified :eek:.</p>
<p>Regarding what to call #1 and #2, my daughter called them ‘front butt’ and ‘back butt’.</p>
<p>My h and I both work on military aircraft. While bordering a plane for a family vacation, our son looked at the plane and very puzzled, asked “Where are the missiles?”</p>
<p>When DS was around 2, I heard a sound emanating from his personal space. Thinking it was time to change his diaper I asked him, “Honey, did you do a poo-poo?” DS replied, “No poo-poo. Honey cut the cheese.” </p>
<p>DD use to call our grocery store “Puglix” instead of “Publix”. We still call it that. She also called her friend “Jon-sa-fin” instead of “Jonathan”.</p>
<p>Why couldn’t they just stay little. Little people have little problems and big people have big problems.</p>
<p>When our HS senior D was very little, she was snooping in my purse, pulled out my drivers license – and immediately kissed my drivers license photo! That melted my heart then and still does today. How many people love you so much that they would kiss your drivers license photo?!!</p>
<p>Also, she thought oatmeal was pronounced “oatmilk,” which made a lot of sense.</p>
<p>In Kindergarten, Son was tested for the GT program. One of the questions was:</p>
<p>Which is these is an odd number:</p>
<p>a. 2
b. 3
c. 6
d. 2 3/4</p>
<p>We asked which he chose. His reply: “I chose 2 3/4 because it looked pretty odd.”</p>
<p>Of my three kids, Son certainly had the most “cute kid-isms.” Thinking back, it was probably because he’s on the autism spectrum, but he was our first, so we didn’t think anything of it except how cute he was.</p>
<p>Elephants were “hup twos” because of the Colonel Hahti’s march scene in Jungle Book.
Bears were “growls.”
A giant was an “addo.” It took me a long time to figure that one out. In *Mickey and the Beanstalk <a href=“yes,%20he%20watched%20a%20lot%20of%20Disney%20videos”>/I</a>, when the giant steals the magic harp, it is only shown as a big shadow…thus, a giant was a shaddow or “addo.”</p>
<p>Another of my d’s memorable moments was her comment on my homemade meatloaf. She was 3 years old, and I had tried a new recipe, and d, as usual, dutifully ate her dinner. When she was done, she looked at me all serious faced, and said “You know, mommy. I think that is the worst thing I ever ate in my life.” It’s hard to explain her tone of voice, but it was soooo funny. She said it the way you would say, “Gee, isn’t the weather beautiful today?” I think that was when I realized that cooking was just not my thing.</p>
<p>These are wonderful stories! I’ll add two:</p>
<p>1) When my English stepdaughter was very small and visiting the US for the first time (age 4 or 5), she told me that she was surprised that everyone in America understood her because she spoke English. I asked her why she was surprised, since I understood her, and I spoke English too. She explained patiently, “that’s because Daddy taught you.”</p>
<p>2) My husband is a writer and works from home. For many years I was in charge of fundraising, marketing and public relations for a regional museum, and my daughter grew up spending a lot of time at the family programs, receptions, and other events where I was running things or “working the crowd.” At a first grade career day program where the kids were asked to share what their parents’ work was, my D’s crisp reply: “My Daddy writes. My Mommy talks.”</p>
<p>Remember the song from the Pocahantas movie, “Savages, savages” sung by the English sailors as they prepared to attack the Native Americans?? A friend’s d would go around the house singing, “Sandwiches, sandwiches…”</p>