bentangle

I could go on about how the very thoughtful be seemingly innocuous gift of RockBand 2 from my sister has gone through the ebb flow of severe addiction and determined withdrawal within our household, but that would take away from this nugget that just happens to be as a result of the song selection my children have been exposed to by this game.  The nugget really needs no explanation, so I will be uncharacteristically brief and take you straight to it.  So here it is:

Grasshopper’s (my 3-year-old son) rendition of the opening to Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”:

Chocolate heart
And your too lame
You give love a Band-aid

Yes, kids do say some of the funniest things.  But few compare to the arguments they can get into over song lyrics.

An exchange between myself and Cricket in the car this weekend while she was looking at a dinosaur book (keep in mind that she just started Kindergarten 2 weeks ago):

Cricket: What’s a quadriped, Daddy?
Me: A quadriped is any animal that walks on four legs.
Cricket: What about ones that walk on two legs?
Me: They would be called bipeds.
Cricket: Oh, okay.
[pause]
Cricket: I have a hypothesis that most dinosaurs were quadripeds.
Me: Okay.  What does the word hypothesis mean? [just testing her]
Cricket: Its an idea that I can test.
Me: And how do you plan to test this idea?
Cricket: By looking at pictures in my book, Daddy.

I cannot take full responsibility for this – I think she learned a number of these words from a new show she has been watching called Dinosaur Train.  But the extent to which her thirst for knowledge has been amped up recently is phenomenal.  Hopefully this will lead her toward learning to read more readily than her interest in it has betrayed recently.  Once that door is open to her, there is no telling where she’ll go next.  But it is an exciting journey to watch.

You know that you’ve spent too much time fighting to get your kids to eat when you are arguing with them to eat their dessert.  That seems to be the position I found myself last night with my son over a bowl of lemon pudding.  We had made an instant box of it and divvied it up 4 ways evenly.  My daughter, my wife and I ate ours up pretty swiftly (it IS pudding – there isn’t really any chewing and what’s not to like), but my son seemed to eat about half of his and then proceeded to engage in one of his favorite past times – jumping on and dismantling the couch.

I only pushed him on the pudding to get a sense of whether he was even interested in finishing it – not to force it on him (the less sugar the better, really).  But he was too busy bouncing around to pay any attention to the line of questioning.  So I finally put it such that if he doesn’t want the rest, someone else would gladly finish it for him – to which my 5-year-old daughter responds “I’d like to volunteer to be that person.” I swear that not a week goes by that she doesn’t surprise me with some new word or phrase that she has seamlessly integrated into her vocabulary.

I take a modicum of pride in the fact that I expose my kids to modern music rather than strictly kids stuff.  While they do listen to and enjoy some of the kids music, they mostly prefer less bubble-gummy fare.  And while I am happy that our tastes can overlap, most of this pride is in the fact that they have a keen enough sense of self to be selective in what they like.

To get to the point, one song that is on one of the CDs they listen to often in the family car, which also happens to be one of my ringtones on my phone (I like the introductory guitar sequence) is “Psycho” by Puddle of Mudd.  Often when it comes on in the car, my 2-year-old son will joke that I should answer my phone.  The other day, though, he had my wife in tears as he is singing it to himself without the song on to back him up as his interpretation of the chorus is “baby I’m a wow” (with significant twang on the word ‘wow’) – for those unfamiliar, the actual line goes “maybe I’m the one”.

Here is a video for the song (unfortunately I don’t have video of my son belting out his version):  Psycho – Puddle of Mudd

If you have kids, you know that they are bound to throw out some gems from time to time – off the wall notions, insights beyond their age, or hilarious misuses of words or phrases. My two are no exception and I am determined to share more of such moments through this new meme. I hope you enjoy it.

Today’s entry is from this weekend from my daughter (she is 5 1/2). She was sitting by herself at the table in our kitchen having a drink while my wife was nearby. The table is a counter-height table and she is sitting along the one side of it in a row of 3 chairs. Their exchange was as follows:

daughter: I feel like I’m at a bar.
mom: What do you mean?
daughter: You know, a bar – like the kind where they have drinks.
mom: Oh yeah?
daughter: [finishes drink, holds up her cup and the rattles the ice in it] I’m empty!