Out of the mouths of babes

I have some favorite memories of things Spencer said when he was little that I will cherish for a lifetime.

Every little kid says things that are absolutely priceless.  This, of course, is the reason the show “Kids Say the Darndest Things” was so successful for so long.

The first time I met one of my husband’s nephews (he was about 3 or 4, as I recall), he was hanging out with Marty’s mom while she skimmed the pool (summertime) and we walked up and she said to him, “We just found a June bug in the pool, didn’t we?”, and he said – very matter-of-factly – “Yep.  Dead as a doornail.”  Just cracked me up.  I’ll never forget it.

When Spencer was around 3 or 4 years old, there are a million conversations that I’ll never forget.  Here’s a few . . .

A friend of mine gave me a couple of sticks of incense because I had commented on the lovely scent.  I had no incense burner so the next time I was at the grocery store, I thought I’d see if they had a basic incense burner.  Spencer was sitting in the front seat of the cart, as always.  Lo and behold, Kash ‘N Karry (Florida grocery store) had a basic wooden incense burner.  Spencer asked, “What’s that?”  I said, “An incense burner.”  When we got home from the grocery store, I went about putting away the groceries while Spencer enjoyed a sippy cup of Juicy Juice.  While I was doing so, he walked into the kitchen and asked, “Mom, when are we going to burn the insects?”

Spencer has always been a very analytical kid and always very talkative on car rides.  One day, driving through town (in Sarasota) in a torrential downpour of rain, Spencer had a breakthrough in physics.  He said, “Mom, you know what’s cool about rain drops?”  I thought, “. . . that in Florida they go away so fast?”, but I said, “What?”  He put one hand up, over his head, with all four fingers and thumb together (forming the shape of a raindrop) and as he lowered his hand, he said, “When they come out of the sky, they’re shaped like drops, but when they hit the ground [and his hand made a splat/explosion motion], they change into a whole different shape.”

One time after we got home from work/daycare and Spencer was standing in the kitchen taking his first loooong drink of Juicy Juice (the kid put some Juicy Juice executive’s kid through college, I tell you), he sort of coughed and choked a little.  He stopped drinking and gasped, as we all do.  I said, “You okay?  Did it go down the wrong pipe?”  And he said, eyes watering, “Yeah, the shoulder pipe!”

And my all-time favorite:  The Christmas that Spencer was 4, I took him up to see his grandmother (my mom) in Leesburg, Florida, a week or two before Christmas (as we often did – nearly every other weekend).  My mom and dad live in a nice, gated community with named sub-neighborhoods.  My dad hadn’t yet retired and joined my mom in Florida, so it was just she and Spencer and me.  We drove around the community to see all the pretty lights and decorations at each entrance.  There was one neighborhood with only a lit Menorah and my mom commented that “There must be a lot of Jewish people in that neighborhood.”  A bit later, we passed a neighborhood entrance with no lights or decorations at all and Spencer said, “Must be a lot of juicy people there.”

Spencer still says things that crack me up, but now he means to be funny.