Le Blog Post

Last Sunday we had dinner guests.  Sensing the need to adhere to the laws of childhood which demand that family secrets be revealed to the general public, Michael seized the moment of passing the garlic bread to announce, cheerfully:  "My dad's been caught by the police three times!"

Luckily, the "Kids say the darndest things" banter was enough to distract from an in-depth discussion of David's no-longer-secret meth habit.

Kidding, kidding!  It was actually marijuana.

But seriously, a few speeding tickets sound a lot more felonious when your five-year-old is telling stories that conjure up images of a police chase and attack dogs.

Or, in Michael-the-French-student's case, chiens d'attaque.  At least that's what Google tells me, and I took an oath to love, honor and obey Google until it gives me bad driving directions.  Besides, an apostrophe in the middle of a word looks way more French than what I would tell Michael, which would probably be something like "le dogs" or "le woofs" or "le *incoherent phlegm noise*."

As part of his language immersion program, we are required to read to him for at least 20 minutes in English every night.  For those of you who think this sounds like a simple task, let me introduce you to the seventh circle of hell bedtime at our house.  This is an activity where we get everyone in their pajamas, squirt toothpaste all over the counter, make sure someone pees on the floor, and then start fights over who gets to sit on Mom's lap to read Hop on Pop for the fifty-seventh time.

Even a foray into the infamous Curious George Learns the Alphabet by Reading Webster's Complete Dictionary last week felt like a welcome break from Dr. Seuss and his hop on popping.  But that was mostly because I got a laugh out of the fact that George learned "G is for goldfish.  The goldfish looks gay."

Really...?  How can you tell?  Was the goldfish wearing a pink shirt and skinny jeans? (Even taking it at face value, how exactly does a goldfish look "happy"?  It seems to me that a goldfish who won the lottery and a goldfish who recently lost his mother would look equally enthralled with the world, which is to say, not at all).

But Michael loves alphabet books so we read them.  And animals, so we read about them.  Last week he even asked me to add a few creatures to our family gratitude list:  "I'm thankful for the birds and the bees, Mom!" he said.

Hmmm...

Just what are they teaching him in those French classes?