Cutisms

On By LynnIn TurtleHead

I just love the way my three kids use the word “versus” as a verb. Do your kids do this?

Like, the Captain might say, “Remember when the Ottawa Senators were versing the New York Rangers?”

Or Gal Smiley might say, “You know that kid John from school? My soccer team was versing his team on Monday.”

Or Little Miss Sunshine might say, “I want to play that video game where Dora is versing Swiper.”

SO cute. Every time one of the three of them has soccer, we just know it’s going to come up. Sir Monkeypants and I wait on the edge of our seats and as soon as one of them says “We were versing the red team,” we can’t help but giggle a little bit in delight. Unfortunately our big smiles have clued the older kids in to the fact that something here is not right. I think the Captain in particular is in danger of losing this particular tic, which is sad.

Also cute: Little Miss Sunshine calls Firefox “Terry Fox.” She will come over to my computer, which has a Firefox icon in the bottom left, and point to it and say, “Is that your Terry Fox?” Or she’ll see me working on a website and say, “Are you using your Terry Fox?” Or she’ll ask, “Can I play video games on your Terry Fox?” SO CUTE.

And here’s another little peek inside the four-year-old mind: she has somehow blended Little Caesars with Tim Hortons and some book she read that had a character called Tiny Tim, and now when she wants pizza for dinner she asks for “Tiny Tim for dinner.” That one took us a while to figure out. We try to use it with a straight face but rarely pull it off.

It’s almost like we have our own little secret language. I love it!

13 thoughts on “Cutisms”

  1. CapnPlanet

    Oh, yeah this sort of thing happens to us all the time. Our kids are definitely at the point where they can be aware of our reactions to their quirks and will modify their behavior if they don’t like the reaction. It’s interesting to see them reach this point, but also sad that the little things they do that delight us so much are suddenly very fragile.

    Our oldest in particular has a way of slowly yelling “THAT WAS AWESOOOOME” at the top of his (little) voice when something particularly excites him. I made the mistake of making him aware that I like when he does it, and now he mostly does it just to get a reaction out of me. It’s almost as honest, but not quite – a little bit of spontaneity died there.

    Funnily enough, though, our kids have next to no idea about the word “versus” – maybe because they’re nearly clueless about spectatorism in sports (we never watch sports on TV).

    (And, aside – how the heck does LMS know about Terry Fox?)

  2. I can’t get enough of this kind of stuff – please keep it coming, since my kids have mostly outgrown it. Angus called McDonald’s ‘Old McDonald’s’. He didn’t say versing, he said ‘facing’, which was almost as cute: “I lined up my soldiers, blue here, red here, cause they’re gonna face each other later.” I’m sure I’ve mentioned how pissed I was at my niece when she mocked Eve until Eve stopped saying ‘smushmallow’ for marshmallow – that was a sad day. Also, we all call shaker Parmesan ‘spread cheese’, although the first time Eve asked for it we didn’t know what the hell she was talking about – and she puts it on everything.

    2. Oh, that reminds me of another one – the Little Miss calls shaker Parmesan Cheese “blues clues.” That’s because when we first had it, she thought it was couscous but she also thought that couscous was called Blue’s Clues, same as the show. So now we all call parmesan cheese blue’s clues, but thanks to the Captain’s witty comment one day, we *also* call the TV show Blue’s Clues, Parmesan Cheese.

      I think you had to be there :).

  3. We’ve called fruit snacks (the packaged Welch’s kind) snacky wackies for so long, I don’t even remember what they are called half the time. My parents were babysitting and Mark asked for snacky wackies (this is years ago, now) and it took my mom an hour of searching in the kitchen to figure it out. That’s snack dedication.

  4. I love those little tics! Meena used to point out the window in the evenings, very excited to tell us about *something*, it took us a while to figure out that she was telling us “It’s darking!” And the phone is now permanently known in the house as the “Hi” (well, what’s the first thing you say when you pick it up?), so it was no surprise to us that a certain Apple device was immediately dubbed the “Hi-pad”. And of course, she also notices every month when I get my “pyramid”.

  5. When my younger son was 4, he announced, after a trip to the bathroom that he “had dollorama”… took me a minute to realize that he meant, of course, diarhea!
    from then on, we refer to the nasty stuff as “dollorama”! we just have to.

  6. My kids are *so* the dvd generation, used to stopping a movie when they want in order to do something else. When they’re playing together, cards or boardgames or an imaginary game, one or the other will still tell the other one, “Pause the game, I have to go to the bathroom.”

    1. My three do this too! I actually meant to put this one in the original post and forgot. They’re always saying, “Pause game!” like something major is going to happen during the three seconds they are peeing. Adorable.

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