To visualize the calendar year, my mind envisions a squished clock—like someone stepped on it at the 12:00 position—where the hour hand travels backwards. As we enter the fall season, the hour hand on my elongated clock is approaching the 3:00 position. Thanksgiving will be between 2 and 1 with Christmas occurring just before midnight, then shortly after the year will start over and we go around again. I am not sure why I think of the year in this way but I always have. I guess sometime as a child I connected the clock and year with the passing of time, the 12 five-minute units on a clock with the 12 months in the year, and adopted the clock as my demonstrative aid for the passing of the years.
It is amazing to me how children’s minds work; the simple logic that leads to if not a correct, a well thought out, conclusion. My son has been particularly known for these types of revelations. My husband, LeRoy, often used the phrase, “under no circumstances”; one day my son asked, “Why do you always say ‘under no circus dances’?” Similarly, my husband used to say, so-and-so had the mind of a sieve whenever someone was confused or didn’t understand something so one day my son told my husband, “You remind of me of Sid,” which is the name of my brother’s dog. Eating lunch at a fast food restaurant one day, my son noticed my husband’s eye brows sort of dipped in the middle like a shallow inverted bell curve; he told my husband, “I know why your eyebrows look like that.” Of course, we couldn’t resist asking why, to which my son explained, “It’s because when you get frustrated, you go like this” and he rubbed his eyebrows with his index finger and thumb. His thinking was my husband had rubbed his eyebrows off in those spots.
One day when my son was 3 ½, he and my daughter were coloring at the kitchen table. He purposely dropped some crayons on the floor and when LeRoy came in from outside, he told my son to pick up the crayons. My son held his right elbow and said “I can’t”. LeRoy asked “Why not?” so my son said “I can’t. My arm’s broke” still holding his arm. My son had heard LeRoy ask he and his sister so many times “why can’t you do this or that, is your arm broke?” that my son decided to use it against him.
These types of revelations have not stopped as my son has aged. A couple of year ago when my son was 5, we were sitting at the gas station waiting for LeRoy to finish pumping gas into our van. My son was whining that he had to relieve himself. I joked with him, “Just squeeze your cheeks together.” I heard a distorted, “It’s not working” and looked back to see him squeezing his face cheeks. Another bathroom gas station moment occurred just last summer in South Dakota. We were pulling up to the pump and LeRoy mentioned he had to relieve himself, #2. My son asked, “Have you been talking to Shane?” (our neighbor from across the street). Confused by what our neighbor had to do with taking a crap, we asked my son what in the world he was talking about. Apparently Shane enlightened my son to “#2” and my son thought he’d invented the saying. We laughed hysterically at this and my frustrated son said, “It’s not like everyone knows what #2 is!!!” So I calmly told him, “Yes, pretty much everyone DOES know what #2 is”.
I don’t know why so many of these kid-isms are related to the bathroom, but not all of them originated with my son. Within the last several months, my daughter complained “why doesn’t it work when I do it?” after her brother had her pull his finger to release his gas. She didn’t realize you have to have the bomb on the ready when you invite someone to pull the finger.
If I thought long enough, I could probably fill a book with all of the kid-isms I’ve heard through the years from my brother’s naming of the erotic pet store a/k/a exotic pet store to my niece’s thinking she wasn’t going to live with her parents anymore when I took her out of town for the weekend to a friend at work whose son thinks he is being “cream-ated” when his mom applies lotion to his dry skin. Hearing what comes out of their mouths and figuring out how their minds work has to be one of the greatest joys of having children around. There’s always something to laugh at!!
