Out of the mouths of babes: eews, worries and sticky dimples

When our youngest daughter Sylvia was a toddler, she was truly taken with her own toes and particularly enamored with what might be found in between them. A certifiable dirtball, Sylvia was constantly barefoot and perpetually grimy. Soil was her playground, and the more of it she could wear in a day, the happier she was.

The stuff between her toes was her currency of joy. The more “eews” she could find hiding among her phalanges after squishing her way through the garden, the happier she was. At 2 or 3 years old, she would make great sport of carefully extracting minuscule mud balls from between her tiny toes and grossing us out by holding them up triumphantly. We never did understand exactly how she arrived at the term “eews,” but it seemed to fit her vibe perfectly.

Kids are pretty good about coming up with just the right name for something and making it work.

Our oldest, Charlotte, had a big thing for raisins as a kid, which she inexplicably referred to from her earliest encounter as “worries.” Not wishing to engage in a pointless battle — and trust me, with Charlotte it would have been an epic clash — we just went with her word. The decision was of little consequence until one evening when a befuddled babysitter called us on a date night to say the baby was sobbing and begging for “worries,” and she had not a single clue what that could be.

Charlotte’s baby Sadie has named her pacifier “Bopus,” and you’d be a fool to try calling it anything other than that.

Some “kid words” can be traced back to an early mispronunciation — or at least a misinterpretation. Our grandson Max has it in his head, at just past 4 years old, that the gifts one receives on a birthday or at Christmas are “presidents” rather than presents.

“Why can’t I have another president?” Max is inclined to say, to which I’m apt to respond, “I ask myself the same thing all the time, Maxie.”

Maxie’s most recent mispronunciation carried us from a hearty chuckle to a gut-busting roar as Kristin and I watched an incoming video of Max and his slightly older brother, and full partner in crime, James, on a call from their mother. She had come upon them moments after they had applied an entire box of adhesive bandages to their bare chests — including, as Max proclaimed through uncontrollable giggles, “On our ’dimples!’”

I’m not sure whether Max’s term will hold after this incident or not, but one thing that is certain to stick is the hard lesson of ripping a bandage off one’s “dimples” without proper anesthesia.

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.