When I touring colleges with my oldest son, he fell in love with a college for which we’d clearly be full pay with little chance of merit. I explained that if he were to go to this college, he’d be using up not only all the savings we had for his college but also the college savings of his little brother as well.
His compassionate response was essentially “You always say [little brother] will be fine no matter what he decides to do! Give me all the college money and he can be a plumber or something. He’ll be fine!”
Later on, little bro (who was 10 or 11 at the time) overheard this story and indignantly burst out with “but I don’t wanna be a plumber!”
So of course "but I don’t wanna be a plumber is a family phrase for when someone is being a wee bit selfish…
I know we have a bunch of these but of course I can’t think of others now. Except one nonsense phrase that became our family’s “safe phrase” when the kids were younger. But I also use that phrase as a password so I won’t share it here. The one that comes to mind is that on vacation one year we stopped in Boone, NC on 4th of July and went to see the town fireworks. There was a kid near us who started asking practically from the first firework “is this the grand finale?” He then repeated the question about every 5 seconds. It went from annoying us to cracking us up. So needless to say anytime we’re watching fireworks we immediately ask “is this the grand finale?”
I LOVE this thread! LOL. Our first son mispronounced so many words when he started speaking and we still use some of them. Crazy isn’t it? He’s 39 years old.
Hook was “huckle”
Pizza was “ee-pa”
Virginia was “ja-rin-va”
Once we had with our D when we were coordinating on a trip was “The eagle has landed, when our plane landed.” D responded “The egg is in the nest,” to indicate she was safely back home. She had no idea “Eagle has landed” was a famous phrase. Sometimes we use those phrases with each other.
When my stepdaughter was young, and she wanted something from her dad, she would bat her eye lashes and say “ love you so much daddy.”
Eventually we all started to do it when we wanted something from him, so it doesn’t have quite the same impact.
My family always went apple picking in the fall. As we got older, we’d sometimes try to find excuses not to go. My dad would always say, “Did you pull your apple-picking muscle?” So that became the saying for when you didn’t want to do something.
@VaBluebird - my college roommate’s first niece couldn’t say, “Uncle” properly. So her husband became “Knuckle Dan.” All the nieces and nephews still call him Knuckle Dan. MY son calls him, “Knuckle Dan.”
I come from a large family and when we went out to restaurants, dad limited us to entrees only to keep the bill lower. Occasionally, when he was feeling particularly generous, he’d say “the sky’s the limit” as we were handed the menus. This meant we could order shrimp cocktail as an appetizer. One sister thought he said “disguise the limit”, meaning he didn’t want anyone to know how large the bill was. Now, every time we make some budget-busting decision, we always justify it by saying “disguise the limit”.
We were once out for dinner with in-laws and were shown to a table with a column next to it. As we starting sitting down, MIL said, “Normally I wouldn’t sit here in a million years.” As one, we all rose and asked for another table. Now whenever DH and I are shown to a bad table, we say to each other, “Normally I wouldn’t sit here in a million years.”
Deer/Bear/Horse/Cow is something we said when we saw anything on a road trip that we thought might be a live animal.
We had been going on a very prolonged road trip from LA to Vegas, to North Rim of Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Petrified Forest, Sedona, Mesa Verde and south Rim of Grand Canyon, then back to LA.
We wanted to point out the great wildlife along the trip (tho sadly there wasn’t much). Whomever saw what they thought was an animal would inevitably say, “Wow—there’s a deer…bear…,horse…no guess a cow”’ it got shortened to the above.
When I was a teenager, my grandmother, who didn’t hear well, was having dinner with us. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but she piped up with, “What’s the matter with his feet?” Now whenever someone clearly misunderstands the conversation we say, “What’s the matter with his feet?”
Whenever one of the kids does something great, another one will say, “That’s it, you’re out of will!” If they do something dumb, the comment is “Oh, you’re back in the will.” The origin of the joke is that I was left my father’s bills to pay, but no money, and I said boy, I wish I’d been left out of the will.
Another, kind of sad, sorry one is that when my father died, I found out about it a month later, as we were dropping D off for her first day of college. I made the choice not to tell her at that point in time. It wasn’t until one of my sons mentioned at Thanksgiving dinner about Grandpa dying that I realized I hadn’t gotten around to telling D. Now, whenever she comes home, the first thing she says is - “Is there something you’d like to tell me, Mom?” It’s become our family go to phrase for secrets or things that shouldn’t go outside the family.
Someone mentioned rocks on the Bag A Week thread, and that reminded me: DS2 loves rocks, and loved them more as a little. He would bring the really ugly ones home. DS1 once said “Our family is special because our rocks have feelings.” It actually says a lot . . .
When my D1 was younger, she once tripped over her words and said “I have no dog in that pony” to mean she had no opinion on that particular issue. We all now say it and it’s evolved to “do you want to have pizza or Chinese food? I have no dog.” Which is even more ridiculous because we have a dog who is the love of my husband’s life, which he tells everyone as soon as they meet.
When people are rude or overbearing, we refer to them as having been raised by wolves by saying “Oh, I think he knows the Wolfs.”
So I am reading through this thread and I’m thinking how cool some of these family “traditions” are, and we don’t have anything like that… and then I remembered… many years ago we were at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant called The Pasta Connection, and we marveled at the large number of supersized people at the restaurant. From that day forward, if we wanted to discreetly take note of an oversized person we will say “pasta connection”. sorry folks.
After a long day of doing toddler things, my then three year old son announced that he needed to go to bed because he was “all out of power”. To this day, anyone who is tired is all out of power
That reminds me that, after the menus were passed around, my dad always said, “I’m just having water. What are you just having?” For years, my brother and I only scanned the prices on any menu for the lowest cost item, whatever it was. We never ordered anything to drink, just water.
All right. I’m going to tell this story about something we used to say all the time, but had to stop rather abruptly.
Once, when I went to pick up DS from our church preschool, the youth pastor’s wife (one of the teachers) came to the door, slipped her arm round me, and started to walk me away from the classroom asking softly, “Did you lose a child?” Astonished and clueless as to where this question came from, I said, “No! Why?” She said, “Oh, I know is your only child, but several times now he as referred to his ‘other brother,’ so I thought perhaps you had lost a child previously. I’m so glad to hear that’s not the case.” I was mortified as I understood instantly where that came from. Whenever DS did something that could be dangerous like putting his hand near the fire or just something we didn’t want him to do, we often said jokingly, “Stop that. You know what happened to your other brother…”. One day he asked us just how many other brothers he had, to which I replied, “I lost count after ten. You’ve lasted the longest, though.” The worst part of the story was that the pastor’s wife and her husband HAD lost a child and she was reaching out to me compassionately. We never used that phrase again.
