Leta is looking for a tiny shoe that belongs to a particular Polly Pockets set we bought her for Easter which, first of all, is already an impossible endeavor. I don’t think the CIA could find that shoe, and I have a hard time understanding why they even create shoes for Polly Pocket figures anyway. Have you ever seen them? Imagine a miniature Barbie. Smaller. Smaller than that. So imagine the feet on that smaller than smaller than a miniature Barbie. Right. Tiny. You can’t even see the feet without a microscope. Now imagine the shoes that fit on those microscopic feet. Keeping track of those shoes is like keeping track of an individual piece of dust. EXCEPT MORE MADDENING.
She keeps asking Jon, “Did you sawl it?”
And he keeps going, “Have I SEEN it?”
Naturally, this has the exact opposite effect that he intends, and she starts screaming bad grammar even more vehemently: “DID YOU SAWL IT?”
“Leta,” he says with a calm, assertive tone that The Dog Whisperer recommends you use with disobedient dogs. Except Jon has never used this tone with Coco and instead prefers the DIE! DIE! DIE! approach to conversation. It involves a lot of tearing at his hair. And using inappropriate words in front of our impressionable four-year-old daughter who just yesterday used SHIT in proper context. I should probably add an OOPS to the end of that revelation, but I’m less embarrassed by her cussing than I am proud that she is figuring out the subtleties of language.
“SAWL is not a word,” he says to her firmly. “It’s SAW. SAWWWWWW.”
She remains unimpressed and, on the verge of emotional collapse, yells, “DID? YOU? SAWLLLLLLLL? IT?” Because she isn’t interested in this little grammar tutorial, DAD, and look! YOUR PROPER USE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS DONE NOTHING TO HELP HER FIND THAT SHOE.
“Jon,” I say trying to step in and ease the tension a little bit. “I’m the English major in this house, and right now I don’t care that she’s saying SAWL. Why do you care so much?”
“Ohhhhhh noooooo, NO YOU DON’T,” he shoots back. “Have you ever listened to the way you pronounce C-R-A-Y-O-N? THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.”
“What does that have to do with this?”
“It means that if I leave you in charge of teaching her how to speak we’ll have to hire a translator to follow her around so that she can communicate with the world.”
“But if you’re in charge of teaching her how to speak—”
“IT’S SAWWWWWWWWWWWW—””
“She’ll—””
“AWWWWWWWW—”
“But—”
“AWWW. AWWW. AWWW. AWWW—”
“Jon—”
“AWW? Aww. AWWWWWWW!”
Internet, I love my husband, I adore him even, but he should not be surprised this afternoon to find that all of his underwear has been put in the freezer.