One of the online learning games in Yikealo’s Phonics class makes a distinctive sound if he gets an answer wrong. On one particular day, Sintayehu was playing with cars out in the hallway when the computer sounded off on one of Yikealo’s misspelled words. Sintay immediately piped up in a firm voice, “Tay appension, Kahlo!”
One day the boys were crashing around the house, jumping off of furniture, and making some crazy ninja moves, all while shouting, “Yikealo-bunga!” Just so you know, guys…..I’m pretty sure it used to be “Cowabunga.”
We get all kinds of random questions from the back seat whenever we're in the van. A couple days ago Yikealo asked, "Hey Mom, what if Dad couldn't see or hear, and what if he didn't have any arms or legs?" I responded with something like, "My gracious! That would be pretty hard, wouldn't it?" to which Yikealo replied, "Yeah...because he couldn't even go to the arcade with me at Disney!" Obviously, that WOULD be the worst of it.
We found a toy of Yikealo’s that had been broken, and Sintay was quick to inform us that, “Dolphin did it.”
On another day, he was staging quite a battle between a couple of his toys, a dinosaur and a rescue hero. When I heard him shouting “Tupid!”, I informed him that he was not allowed to say “stupid.” He hurriedly set me straight, “I DINT! Dinosaur did it!”
When I asked him to please take his hands out of his pants, he tried to tell me, “I dint! It was Kahlo!”
We were getting ready to pull Yikealo’s crazily angled loose front tooth, and Yikealo was nearly beside himself with excitement. He looked at me gleefully and pronounced, “Mom, I am going to be JUST SO CUTE!!” Later that day, he asked David if the tooth fairy was pretty. David responded that she was very pretty, but “not beautiful, like your Mom.” Ummmm….I’m pretty sure that’s called being deceitful, Dear.
At the library one morning, I made the mistake of complimenting Sintay on his good behavior. For weeks afterward, whenever I told him to stop doing something or mentioned that his attitude was not very good, he would respond, “No! Nuh bood boy, liberry!” (His way of saying, “You said I was a good boy at the Library!)
Along those same lines, whenever we tell him to go potty before bed, he complains, "I alweady did...last night!"
While shopping in a large department store, I pushed Sintayehu’s stroller down an aisle of women’s dresses. He pointed at every one we passed and deemed it, “Yummy”, “Yucky”, or “Uh-TUCK-ting!” (disgusting.) He was pretty clear on his tastes: almost everything was found wanting except for three or four sleeveless, color-blocked sheathes, all of which were declared, “Yummy!”
On the way to work one morning, Yikealo, who had been riding quietly behind me, suddenly announced, “Mom, I have a really bad idea. What if it was the law that if you burped while you were on your way to work, you would get fired? Even James would have to get fired if he burped.” (James, for those of you who don’t know him, is my brother-in-law and the president of our corporation, and is much beloved by my boys for his belching abilities.) I asked how anyone would know if you had burped in your own car, and he said, “Because that would be the first question that you would have to answer when you got to work. If you said yes, then you’d have to go home again because you had broken the law.” Where does he come up with this stuff?
Earlier this week, we were eating lunch at a restaurant. Across the room, someone sneezed, and Sintayehu immediately turned around and shouted, "HEY! Say 'cuse me!!" Right....this from the child who tries to see how many times he can burp after every time he takes a drink.
I was exclaiming about how warm the boys’ hands were one snowy day on our way to work. When I mentioned that mine were freezing, Y gave the following suggestion for warming them, “Well, if only we were a robot family, but we had people hands, we could sleep like this: we could have a bed that was made of 2000 cushions and you could climb up a ladder fer you could sleep on the top, and then you could stretch your arms down fer you could put them under the bed (because it would be made of cushions) and then your hands would get all warm, and then Dad could snuggle you and warm up the rest of you, fer his hands are never cold.” Okay then…and here I was thinking that I should just put my gloves on. :-) His random, stream-of-consciousness imaginings just make me smile!
While Yikealo was taking a math test, I temporarily forgot to fill in his answer to one of the questions on the online test sheet. He informed me that I was “a troubler of Israel.” (King Ahab calls the prophet Elijah this on one of his audio Bible stories.)
David drinks his coffee black, while I add plenty of flavored creamer to mine. While painting a self-portrait in Art, Yikealo was trying to mix the right shades of brown for his skin and eyes. When I told him that the colors were good, he exclaimed, “I am the same color as your coffee, and my eyes are the same color as Dad’s coffee! No wonder you always say you’re going to eat me up!”
On Easter Sunday, the first words out of Yikealo’s mouth were, “The Lord is risen indeed!” followed by, “Hey! It sure is a good thing that God is alive now so that He can help my cough get better!” Oh Buddy….your cough is the least of it, and apparently we need to clarify some of the finer points of the Passion week story for you, but I’m so glad that you’re getting the main point: that we serve a risen, LIVING Lord!
