Fun with words

One great thing about kids is that you not only see them grow physically, you can also hear them grow intellectually.

Every day Mark tries out new words he's heard. Sometimes they make sense, in both pronunciation and context ("This shrimp tastes peculiar!") and sometimes they don't ("Oooh, I just got goosebumps on my flush!").

Yesterday, he brought me two new interesting words. The first was the name of something he bought at school. "Look, Mom," he called to me, "I got a new Smencil!"

"You got a new pencil?" I asked, a little confused.

"No," he said, "Not a pencil, a SMENCIL. It's a pencil that smells good!"

He showed me. The pencil was made of recycled newspapers, placed in a plastic tube. Mark uncorked it and thrust it at my nose.

He was right, it did smell good. Like grapes. Or rather, grape candy, since grapes don't really have much of a smell. I inhaled, and then Mark re-capped the tube.

"Don't wanna use it all up at once," he said protectively.

He liked his new Smencil so much, he even took it in to his drum lesson. He came out of the lesson juggling two drumsticks, a notebook and his Smencil.

"Can I help you?" I asked. He handed over the drumsticks and notebook, then opened the Smencil tube, took a quick whiff, and re-capped it. "It's so goooood!" he said.

We were meeting my friend Nicky for dinner. During the drive, Mark uncapped the tube and smelled his Smencil at least five more times.

When I couldn't take it any more, I told him to stop sniffing the pencil every three seconds, or I would take it away. He looked (and sounded) like some sort of addict taking quick hits from his clear little vial.

Which prompted Mark to share his second new vocabulary word with me.

"Mom," he said, "Sometimes you're a tyrant."

I almost crashed the car. This was definitely a bite-your-tongue, don't-laugh-out-loud moment.

"Oh, I am?" I replied, trying to remain very serious. "Do you know what 'tyrant' means?"

"Yes," Mark answered. "It means sometimes you're unfair, and kinda mean. You only do what you want to, and you don't listen to what anyone else has to say." When he realized that sounded kind of...not nice, he repeated, "Sometimes."

I was so proud and somewhat offended all at once--he knew the context of a new word (yay!), then used it to describe me in an unflattering way (boo!).

But I don't take things like that too seriously--truth be told, it kinda cracked me up. I thought this was a learning opportunity, rather than a get-really-defensive opportunity.

"You're right, that is what it means," I told him. "Good job! But if that's the true definition, don't you think you're kind of a tyrant sometimes, too?"

Mark was caught off guard by that one. "I'm not a tyrant!"

"Well," I reasoned, "You said that I'm mean, and only want to do things my way. Aren't you the same? Don't you always want me to do things your way? Don't you get mad when I won't?"

"True," he admitted.

"And don't you ignore me when I ask you multiple times to do something you don't want to do?"

He nodded. I could see him looking out the car window now--he wasn't quite sure how the conversation had turned against him.

"Well then," I told him cheerfully. "I guess we're both a couple of tyrants! Good thing we've got each other."

I could see him smile in the rear view mirror. But I knew he still thinking I was a bigger tyrant than he was.

I'm the mom--sometimes being a tyrant is part of the job. And I'm okay with that, as long as the child I'm lording my tyranny over can protest by using his really good vocabulary.