awful doggy
The kids are getting older, which means I feel less and less comfortable sharing things that they say. That is a shame because they say a lot of excellently funny things and I would like to talk about them.
Sometimes, they say words in the right context in terms of the sentence but it comes across as terribly dramatic. Like this:
Me: Doctor, can you check my temperature? I don’t feel very well.
Son: (shoving toy thermometer in my mouth in the manner of a Covid swab) Alright, this will take a minute.
Me: (gagging)
Son: (suddenly grave) Oh dear. I’m sorry to tell you, you are bad.
Or sometimes dramatic words are delivered too casually:
Me: Doctor, can you save my Pikachu?
Son: Let me take a look at him. (examines cuddly toy briefly before flinging it away) Ah. Apologies, but he is dead.
I love these conversations but I continue to dance close to the line of ‘what is a sweet anecdote’ and ‘what is going to really embarrass them when they get older’ and the more they age, the closer that line is. This is why I rarely write about my daughter anymore, although sometimes I worry that it comes across as me not loving her as much but actually, I just want to protect her. I suspect this will be one of the last times I write conversations with my son word-for-word online (although I reserve the right to write them in my journal in meticulous detail so I can tease him about them when he is a teenager).
I do miss the funny word mistakes. When my son was little (as in barely toddling) he used to say the word ‘digger’ all the time. At least ten times a day. We never actually found out what he meant by digger (for clarity he was never once referring to an actual digger. Once I bought him a book about diggers to see if it would help but it didn’t). In the end, we decided it was his catch-all word for ‘I don’t know what this object is called but I want to talk about it’.
My Mum decided my house was haunted and he was obviously talking to someone we couldn’t see (a ghost called Digger, really?) which is classic Mum trolling because she likes to wind me up about things being haunted.
I also miss theme tunes being sung incorrectly. For example, my daughter used to think the theme tune to Swashbuckle went like this:
‘Hey ho! Swashbuckle and snow! Tickle the pirates, yo ho ho!’
Which is obviously superior to the actual words.
But the best one was Waffle the Wonder Dog. I miss Waffle, not because I actually liked it (what is it with incessantly cheerful parents on cBeebies?) but because once a day I got to hear the kids sing-yelling ‘AWWWWWWWWFUL DOGGY! AAAAAAAWWFUL DOGGY! Such a clever dog, such a clever dog you are!’
Ah. The days are long and the years are short and stuff. ❤
