You want fries and a ball-gag with that?

We happen to think our 5-year-old daughter is a pretty smart cookie. Honestly, we think both of our kids are very bright but this story mostly concerns the Girl.

She has been able to read since she was 3 years old and reading whole books by herself since she was about 3 and a half.  That made it a lot easier on us. We had a little more time we could devote to caring for the Boy when we could plop the Girl down with a book and not have to actually read it to her.  Don’t get me wrong. We still read books with her whenever she wants; we just don’t have to do it constantly any more.  She will now read just about anything and everything that we leave lying around the house. A couple of weeks ago she was flipping through the Haynes repair manual for my truck. When I asked her to read part of it to me she was able to do it with almost no hesitation and even properly pronounced the words she did not know.

Now that she is a little older and has a great many books under her belt her spelling is getting better and better. It is getting to the point that we can no longer have surreptitious conversations right in front of her by spelling key words instead of just saying them.  It doesn’t do us any good because she can spell most of the word we are trying to sneak past her. Our situation has gotten to the point that we have to try to disguise the topic of conversations using long, convoluted sentences and large, obscure words.  Yeah, that’s not working out too well for us either.

One trick that seemed to work for a little while was to make acronyms of the words or phrases we were trying to slip by. Instead if saying “granola bars”, which were one of her favorite snacks, we would say “GB”. “Goldfish” turned into “GF” and “ice cream” became “IC”. Obviously once her spelling abilities really kicked in she could tell exactly what we were referring to with the acronyms. There was an upside to the situation, though.

Now that our son is learning the fine art of speech and communication we are using the same tricks on him. The Girl is doing her best to help.  She will spell out the words of items she wants to talk about but doesn’t want the Boy getting all riled up when he hears them.  She has also realized the simplicity, efficiency and speed of acronyms and will use them even when it is not entirely necessary.

This evening we did not really have anything planned for dinner. Especially after the restless sleep we all seemed to have last night we did not want to go to any great lengths and dirty up a lot of dishes to concoct a meal. My wife had a hankering for Chef Boy-R-Dee spaghetti and meatballs and the kids and I decided to cook up some frozen chicken nuggets and fries in the oven.

As my wife was heating up her meal in the microwave our daughter walked over, glanced at the can and asked, “Mommy, are we having S&M for dinner?” Luckily it didn’t occur to me to look around and say, “I’m sorry, honey, but I don’t think we have any whipped cream left.” Needless to say, we had a pretty good laugh over that one. I hope your sadomasochistic evening was as full of good food and bondage as ours was.