Stop, Go, Eye

Being surprised by Luca ain’t hard. Every day, he seems to have a new word. The other night, I was reading him a book about body parts and he said, “Eye.”

I said, “Eye? As in the thing you see with? Or Aye, as in what you say to a pirate captain?”

In response, he poked me in the eyeball. He’s got way too many other words to waste time with here, but my favorite thing he says is, “Aaargh Spider!”

Truth be told, it’s from a book Diana reads to him titled “Aaargh Spider!” But I just love it when he pads around, stops and shouts, “Aaaa ‘Pider,” for no reason what so ever (Denver outlawed spiders in 1962).

Elijah, on the other hand, is harder to be surprised by. He has a fairly strong command of the English language. Sometimes he’ll get you by walking into the kitchen and saying, “Something smells DELISH in here.”

But the other night, he got me good.

We were reading the book, “Go Dog Go,” which involves dogs, um, going and stuff. But we got to a part where a line of dogs were driving sports cars. Why? For the same reason a group of dogs were playing on top of a blimp two pages earlier. Because author P.D. Eastman was a known heroin stiffer (dear Eastman family legal team, I am joking).

Suddenly, Elijah says, “Go. G. O. Stop. S.T.O.P.”

I closed the book and stared at him. “Did you just read, young man?”

“I don’t know.”

I pointed at “go.” I said, “What’s that word?”

“Gu-Oh. Go.”

I pointed at the S word.

“Sss-tuh-oh-puh. Stop.”

“Are you kidding me, man? Who taught you how to do that? That school we spend too much on?”

“They’re just letters, daddy. Did you know “daddy has three d’s?”

I did not know that.