It always cracks me up when kids surprise me with
adult language—well, not that kind of adult language, but sophisticated concepts
or idioms that they’ve picked up on their own.
A while back, I was spending the weekend with the boys I used
to nanny for while their parents were away. On day two, the three-year-old had
the inevitable I-miss-mommy meltdown. I tried to calm him down by
commiserating, saying that I missed my mom, too, since she lived far away. “She
has to take an airplane to come visit me,” I said. He looked up at me and asked
tearfully: “Is it a prop plane or a jet plane?” A heated discussion of the relative merits and uses of prop versus
jet planes ensued.
Today’s Kids Say the Cutest Things has a quote along these
lines that made me laugh out loud. A parent writes, “We recently
moved to a new house. My three-year-old told me she likes this house a lot
better. When I asked her why, she said, ‘At our old house, the curtains always
got on my nerves.’”
Poor thing, having to put up with those awful curtains all
those years…
Photo: Corbis
