5 Things You May Know About
Little Kids

By Christopher Hollenback

This week, my friend Kim wrote a fun blog called 5 Things You May Not Know About Me. She challenged me to follow suit with a blog about five things. So here are five things you may know about little kids.

Number One: Little kids have strange phone etiquette.
Belle picked up my cell phone and pretended to call her cousin, Emma. "Hello, Emma? This is Belle. Are you wearing dress-up clothes? Great. Bye."

Hey, she cuts to the chase and doesn't eat up your "anytime minutes."

My friend called and said to Belle, "How was your baby brother's baptism, Belle?" and Belle said, "It was BUURRRRP--good." Then an awkward pause. "I burped."

Number Two: Little kids are a lot like clothes dryers.
They both have a talent for making socks disappear. It's as if David Copperfield came to your living room, raised one of his cheesy eyebrows and made them vanish.

Ever notice it's always just one sock that disappears? I don't know how my kids do it. It's like I'm some deadbeat parent of kids who go on a shooting spree, as if I'm going to go in their room some day, pull out a shirt and, to my horror, 36 non-matching socks will fall out of a sleeve. "Oh my gosh!" I'll say. And everyone will ask me, "Don't you pay attention to what your children are doing?" And I'll be like, "I was was watching football and they assured me they were folding laundry..."

Number Three: Two-year-olds love to stare at the crotches of stuffed animals for hours to determine whether they're "poopy." Is this normal? They don't tell you about this in Parent School. Yesterday, Belle held up the legs of a stuffed animal -- Bucky Badger -- and asked me, "Daddy, is Bucky poopy?"

"Looks clean to me," I said.

She kept staring for a few seconds, holding one of Bucky's feet up in the air with the serious look of a surgeon.

"Oh yeah, he's poopy," she diagnosed, nodding to herself definitively. "I'll change him." And I'm thinking, "OK, little Ms. Crazy Pants."

Number Four: 'AWEsome' is the new, well, 'awesome.'
I'm always telling Belle not to kneel or stand on furniture, but she insists, and the other day she kneeled on a plastic kid's chair, tipped it over and planted her face in the carpet.

It was like a car accident, I didn't want to look yet I couldn't help but peek to see if a head was rolling down the street. Belle popped right up and said, "That was AWEsome!" And I was like, "That was AWEsome!"

My wife frowned.

Then Belle covered for us: "Mommy's AWEsome!"

Number Five: Little girls can be just as fickle as college women. For example, Belle and I were in the store and she noticed Dave Matthews, a rock star, performing on a 50-inch flat screen TV. She was entranced.

"I LOVE Dave!" Belle said like a roadie. "Watch more, Daddy?" For the next three days we watched excerpts of his DVD at home, and she said, "I LOVE Dave Matthews, I want him to sign my diaper!"

OK, she didn't say that, but the next day she looked at me, tilted one shoulder up to her ear, pulled her eyebrows up in a fearful look and said, "Dave Matthews scary!" True story. Dave was yesterday's news. I hope she's not like that with her future boyfriends, for their sake. She'll be like, "I LOVE Craig," one day, then the next day, "Craig's scary!" Unless, of course, it's true that Craig's scary. Then I'll have to ask David Copperfield to make Craig disappear.

Copyright Christopher Hollenback, 2007, all rights reserved.