Jack

Some things Jack has said recently that I want to remember forever:

Cars that have no roof... invertibles

Shorts that can be worn both regular and inside out... reflexible

The other day he was sitting on the toilet, as he often does. Jack is a leisurely pooper so this was well into his spell on the throne. I had long since gone back to whatever it was that I was doing, when he called me back into the bathroom. "Mom," he said, "I have knees on my fingers". "Oh," I said, "Those are called knuckles". "Well I think they look like knees," he said. Fair enough, I thought.

Another question posed by Jack while sitting on the toilet: Mom, if we fart when we're pooping, do we have to say excuse me?

I must preface this one by stating that we have worked very hard to banish certain naughty words from his vocabulary; his insult of choice would most often be hurled in a venomous tone of voice at whomever happened to be thwarting his plans for world domination at a given moment. Finally, we had sufficiently impressed upon him that screaming "stupid baby" at any human was an infraction worthy of a good time-out ("Aawww! Not again!!!"), and he was consistently finding more creative uses for his anger, like, say, beating on his sister (we're working on that one now). So one day, he trips and stubs his toe on a stool in the bathroom. He is hopping around, crying, holding his foot. And since I am a firm believer in the healing power of a well-timed, particularly vulgar curse word when in a similar situation, I said to him, "Jack, you know, sometimes when you stub your toe, the only thing that will make you feel better is to say a really bad word." So he looked up at me, with, literally, a gleam in his eye (possibly caused by the eye-watering agony of a stubbed toe), and assessing whether or not he could trust me not to throw him bodily into his usual penalty box, he hollered out, before collapsing into a fit of giggles, the toe cured, the baddest word he could think of, "BABY!!!"