Word Choice

Recently, the Mild Wife and I were catching up with my sister and our nephews/nieces over a video conference call. I've mentioned this set of calls once before, when the Mild Wife and I inadvertently ended up playing virtual hide-and-seek for two hours. It had been a while since we'd chatted, so we were mostly just catching up and letting each other know how we were doing.

As it happens, these calls tend to occur around breakfast time, so it's not uncommon for us to either point to breakfast items or prepare breakfast as it happens. We don't exactly point a webcam at the stove while it's on, but you can definitely point out what's happening. Say we are brewing coffee; that usually means there is a receptacle holding coffee in it nearby. If we happen to be using one that is made of glass, that means that we can point to the coffee inside and describe how it is turning from grounds and water into coffee. It's also easy to serve pancakes or eggs onto a plate as a munchkin watches, in order to show that cooking was involved and what we will be eating soon. All in all, it tends to work out.

However, the one thing we realized recently was that we also have to be a tad more careful about our language now. Have you ever tried to get a toddler to eat something? It's a common trick to say something like, "one for Daddy, one for Mommy, one for [toddler]." Or you can try to get them to eat by asking them to take a bite for every person they know (that list is remarkably similar to the one above). Basically, it's a common thing around really young munchkins.

In fact, it's so common, that if you're playing pretend, that tends to come up. Say you've got a toy that resembles anything in the kitchen. It can be a pot, a pan, or a piece of fruit, that toy will inevitably be used to describe a meal of some sort. And when that happens, the partitioning game is likely to appear. You don't even need multiples of the item, it's just ingrained in the kids so that you can pretend to partition it out. 

So, when we were on a call with our nephew and our niece, the Mild Wife did this with some pancakes. I forget exactly what she said, but the phrase, "and one for [Mild Nephew]" popped out. This was probably something we've said to him a bunch of times before during our calls, but this time, he reacted a little bit differently.

Now that he's older, he took the words a little more literally. This time, he said something like, "oh, great, I want one." When his mom pointed out that pancakes were on our end of the call instead of theirs, he immediately asked if we could ship them to him. When I say immediately, I mean in direct response to his mom's commentary, without skipping a beat.

Yup, that kid clearly understands distribution and shipping at this point, and he's apparently past the point where the partitioning trick works with him.

We hastily apologized for any confusion, and quickly changed the subject to something else, but the Mild Wife and I shared a chuckle when it was all over. Little kids learn quickly, and the Mild Nephew clearly knows a thing or two more than last we saw him. We're going to have to be a bit more explicit about our wording moving forward, lest we cause any inadvertent cravings again.

That Mild Nephew is a smart one, I tell you.