Funny Kids and Strange Traditions III

I haven’t done one of these posts in a long time so I have more fun to share.

Alex had read a short story for an English assignment and I was asking him questions about the story to prep him for a test. When I asked something about the Iditarod (the big dog sled race), he said, “That’s how you say it? The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking it was ‘Idiot-rod’.”

When Alex was about 5 years old and Elisa was 3, I asked them both to draw pictures of things that scared them. Elisa was having night terrors almost every night and I was trying to get to the bottom of it. Elisa’s drawings weren’t very helpful, but I learned something about Alex that I didn’t know. Along with spiders and snakes, he drew Lamanites. Too bad I don’t still have that picture.

We were at the bank’s outside teller window about a month ago waiting in line. Alex saw someone standing in line behind one of the cars and said, “There’s a pedestrian in line over here.” Elisa looked and said, “She’s not that old.” It turns out she thought a pedestrian was an elderly person. So we joked about her thinking that pedestrian crossing meant old people crossing.

Then the other day for some reason Alex sarcastically said “Freak of nature” to Sabrina (nice brotherly love) and Elisa said, “No, you have nature. Whatever that means.” She thought Alex had said “Freak, have nature.” So now when Elisa does something silly Alex says, “Have nature!”

Sabrina loves to write books and is currently working on “Little Pig, Big Pie”. (Being the completely biased mom that I am, I think she writes the BEST books.) She wrote that the pie was a “Blewberry, Blackberry, Raspberry, Hallyberry, Strawberry Pie.” I asked her if she knew what Halle Berry meant. She said, “No, but I heard it on TV.” She was embarrassed when I told her she is an actress.

One of our strange traditions is that when we drive under a specific bridge (Sabrina’s favorite bridge) on the freeway, we all yell or make a silly noise. If we forget because we’re talking or I’m thinking of something while I’m driving, Sabrina gets upset that she did it alone.

Along with that, while I was growing up every time we’d pass through a tunnel, we would try to yell and hold it for as long as the tunnel lasted. Robin started a similar thing with the kids that we yell, “Geronimo” and hold the “oooooooo”.