Misstatements and Children

Dave has been practicing some of his harder-to-say words again, and I just had to record them here for posterity. It really is interesting what comes out sometimes.

For instance, there was the one time he wanted to tell one of the girls that works for me that she was pretty. So, he called her a whore. Luckily for me, she understood and took it in good grace.

Dave invariably used to refer to our daughter Rowan as He and Him. I finally broke him of that habit. Unfortunately, he now refers to our identical boys as Her and She. I keep telling him that he had better correct that before they get to school age, or else they will get beaten up the first time he picks them up at the playyard. He nods his head in understanding, closes his eyes, thinks really hard and gets the right words out. I wish he would try that hard the first time.

When we were younger, we used to kid with each other. "You're silly!" I would exclaim. "No, I'm not, I'm affectionate!" he would reply. Now it comes out as, "I'm infectious!" I keep telling him that he may be that too. He has not been able to get that word correct yet, despite hard practice.

It was a bad day when he tried to help my parents by taking their clothes upstairs for them after they were done in the wash. "I've taken the trash upstairs for you." Yep, bad day indeed.

This evening, I had to look twice when he looked at one of the babies and said, "You can't eat that, you need teats!" I then had him practice making the "th" sound. "TeeTH, teeTH!" I would say. That is remarkably hard for him, and he can pronounce it correctly after multiple tries, but it doesn't seem to stick.

'Course, I have to wonder about how his speech affects the kids. Rowan does not enunciate as well as other kids, and has trouble being understood. I have to wonder how much Dave has influenced her speech patterns. Rowan is also old enough to start correcting Daddy. If she asks for milk, and he says water, she says, "No Daddy, Milk! Milk!" It saddens me that she has to correct her father so often at her young age. She is only three, after all.

Still, none of us are perfect. My father was talking to me this evening, and repeatedly called my daughter by my sister's name, Jeannie. Rowan does look a lot like my sister when she was about the same age, but as I pointed out to Dad, one of them was bound to be annoyed if he said that to their face. So he took to calling them "the taller one" and "the shorter one".