Our family has a tradition called quote of the day (or week, or month, with the occasional quote of the year). Previous quotes have included things like, “Show me boats!” one of our son’s earliest phrases. Or the time we were eating dinner out and he was having his complementary kids meal dessert sundae and had somehow managed to spread it all over his face.
An aside: one thing I will never understand is a child’s almost complete inability to get delicious treats all the way in their mouths. They eat like Cookie Monster when something tasty is nearby – they cram it at their face (not in, an important distinction) and chew with the mouth open “OM NOM NOM!” spraying crumbs or other sweet and sticky substances everywhere. I don’t know how many times I’ve said, “Don’t you want the cake in your tummy? If it’s all over the table it’s not in your tummy.” This logic is completely lost on them.
Anyway, our son had the ice cream and chocolate sauce smeared all over his face. When the Wife saw him she exclaimed, “Oh my, you are a mess.” To which he replied, “But still, a good looking man!”
Quote of the year.
Other quotes become family catch phrases or euphemisms for different things. A popular euphemism these days is “pitatchkes.” Our daughter, all of seven years old was showing off a drawing from school. She’s explaining it to the Wife when she says, “I drew the cow with milk coming out of its pitatchkes.”
Now the word nipple doesn’t exist in our household. “Put on a shirt! Do you want the whole world to see your pitatchkes?!”
Surprising situations are often met with exclamations of, “What the millimeters?!” I forget who came out with that spontaneous quote but I have to say it’s preferable to the adult alternative. The Wife is known at work for swearing like a sailor so it’s important to have a family-friendly alternative.
The kids are not the only ones who can coin these phrases. As I’ve explained before the Wife doesn’t have an extensive grounding in American popular culture. Occasionally I come out with some appropriate pop-culture quote (as any good nerd would) and sometimes she throws caution to the wind and tries to apply it herself. You can imagine my confusion one day when, encouraging me to begin a task, she says, “Stack ’em, Jonas!”
Wait, what?
At my look of confusion she says, “Isn’t that right? What’s that show…with the song you guys always sing…it’s like, Hawaii or something…”
And then the light bulb goes off. Hawaii Five-0. “I think you mean, ‘Book ’em, Dano.'”
I think in the end I take somewhat more pleasure in using this catch phrase than she does.
And they continue to happen all the time. The other day the Wife and I were having a conversation when she saw our son over my shoulder. In one breath she said, “No no! He’s going into the bathroom with the Kindle and it’s your fault!”
There are actually several stories tied up in this very loaded sentence but the best part is, it’s my fault.