Kidspeak

Sure do.  Sure do.  As in kids say the darndest things, of course.  Sometimes, their silly pronunciations or emphatic proclamations stick with their parents or other adults.  Each family knows intimately the meaning of some silly gibberish that no one else would even attempt to guess.

Thus the beloved “dee-dee-i-dee” which was my little two year old son, Tim’s, term for spiders and more specifically, the daddy long leg.  When Jana was in kindergarten at that same time period, her teacher asked that each child bring in a spider to class to be housed in a renovated fish tank and studied in all it’s eight legged glory.  We caught our unsuspecting daddy long leg in the cold garage in the dark of the winter’s dawn.  Jana immediately gifted the chosen one with the fluid name of “Dee-Dee-I-Dee”.  Honestly had it not been for the connection of that special name, we probably would have forgotten all about that little project.

Tim kept us entertained with other word bumbles such as “hangaber” for hambuger, “bugglegum” for the obvious and “nakkin” for napkin.  He took a few years to figure out how to get the “r’ sound going, so he would say “wowk” for work and “Aunt Bowb” for Aunt Barb.  To this day, I am enamored with little knee high tykes who cannot pronounce their “r’s”.  It brings me back to the sound of Tim’s little boy voice in an instant.

With Jana, it was more her phrases than word stumbles that were memorable.  That’s why I started out this post with the “sure do, sure do”.  She would just as equally and emphatically declare “sure don’t, sure don’t” if she had a negative vibe about something.  My little princess was quite inventive too.During her potty training times, she didn’t use the traditional words such as pee and poop.  Not my girl.  She called it as she saw it:  orange juice and fudgies.  So we would often hear a determined “Have to make orange juice!” from her instead of the run of the mill “Have to go potty!”

To this day, we still say hangabers when the mood strikes.  If a spider isn’t too evil looking, it is an automatic “dee-dee-i-dee”.  And I often reply, “sure do, sure do” when I’m amongst my familial peeps.  Occasionally my husband gets called “Daddy Darf” which was my daughter’s interpretation of Garfield the cartoon cat.  It transferred to Jim, because, well, as Dad, it fit.

And while we never did figure out why Tim often repeated the word “Maverick” when he was eighteen months, we still say it once in awhile in the same tone he did.  He was quite proud that he, and he only knew what the word meant.He would grin and repeat it whenever we asked him what he was trying to tell us. 

The memories of our kids’ words and phrases are like snapshots in time.  I can remember different visual associations with each one.  And I will treasure them always.