Kids say the darndest things

family of four sitting near to me whilst i was on my break at an airport. little boy slyly kicks younger sister, mum spots him and tells him to apologise, boy denies having kicked sister. mum kicks boy. boy cries and goes to sit next to dad

boy:she kicked me, do something about it
dad: you shouldn't have kicked your sister
boy: but i didn't, and anyway she's not allowed to kick me, do something about it
man: what can i do?
boy: get rid of her!!
man: what???
boy: get rid of her, people do it all the time!

:/

transportation hubs are great for witnessing physical abuse

That sounds like the villain origin scene where it's revealed that he's always been a psychopath.

4yo telling me about the bad dream that woke him up. In it I apparently asked if he wanted to go to the shops with me but then didn't take him (so was left on his own?).
Anyway, I told him 'that dream's gone away now'. And he said "I hope it's gone into 'George'" (a naughty boy at his pre-school).

Fuckin George

take that george

Tutoring a primary school kid to help him read; the book we'd just finished had superheroes. "Do you like superhero movies?" I ask, trying to find out what kind of stories he likes. "Not reallly". So what kind of movies do you like? None. TV shows? None. Video games? None. So what do you do for fun?

"I just sit around".

relatable

My 10 year-old added this to the to do list on my desk:

* BOMB PUTIN

lol!

4yo, eating lunch, out of nowhere: i don't even know what a caterpillar's dream is

(turns out he was talking about the Hungry Caterpillar game on the ipad)

I don't usually get to post in this thread because my elder one is past the cute stage and into teen surliness, and the younger one is pretty nonverbal.

Anyway Sam was watching the 1991 animated "Beauty and the Beast." He paused it and pointed to the bookseller, then to me, and said "Same!"

I tried to figure out what he meant - we both have grey hair? Vaguely bearded? We both wear glasses and like books?

Sam thought for a moment and said, "Dad is nerd?"

Sigh. Yes. Dad is nerd.

ahaha sorry man

Classic.

Love it.

Opal's really into drawing and she starting to learn how to write (a bit) and read (a very little bit) so she's always asking us how to spell words. Tonight as she was lying in bed and I was looking for a book for her to read, she said "daddy, how do you spell pazook". I had to ask her 5 times what word she was trying to ask about and kept saying "that's not a real word" and finally "can you use it in a sentence" and she said, you know, when you're surprised and you say oh my, pazooks! So I said, do you mean "gadzooks"? and she said yeah. It was just cute, and I have no idea where she got it in her head to say "gadzooks". She ended up making a 2pg comic strip on two stickies. One had a guy's face and a talk bubble that said "boo!" (officially the first word she ever learned to spell/write) and the other page had another guy, seemingly shocked, saying "gadzooks!"

that is really cute and clever and darling

My 7yo went on and on praising Lee Harvey Oswald's marksmanship-- "He was a very good shot. You can't take that away from him."

That is exactly the right response! 🤣

a future @dril on our hands

LOL'ing

Opal has never heard a Weird Al song but it's come up once or twice, where I've explained how he sang "eat it" or whatever. I guess it's one of those things that stuck with her because this morning we were talking about Ain't No Stopping Us Now, which is what her school plays as all the kids come out for pick-up (which is insanely cute), and I referred to it as the pick-up song and said "I thought you said hiccup song" and I said no and she said "that's what Weird Al would sing, he'd call it the hiccup song".

Just kinda cracked me up that she'd think about that. I guess I should probably play her some Weird Al. But I guess I have to play her the original songs too.

Aw man, that's so cute.

My youngest is 11. He's at the age where he's more or less self-sufficient and has developed a sense of modesty. However, I occasionally give him a hand with washing his hair because it starts to smell like wet dog. Last night, as I was rubbing shampoo into his scalp, he said, "You don't have to be so damn aggressive."

oh man, the "wet dog" smell – can totally relate.

This isn't really a "darndest thing"; but last week, I told my son he could open an Incognito tab in Chrome, for a coding project he was working on (something about being able to have two accounts open at once, without being logged in on one of them). I told him, straight up – "Please don't use Incognito mode without asking us; we need to know what you're doing online." (I figure if he knows about Incognito mode, may as well be straight about it and have to rely on trust.)

Later, he asked, "Why would someone use Incognito mode, anyway?" I was like, "Uh... for example, if you share a computer with someone and you're shopping for a gift, and don't want them to see." He said, "But that's the only reason, right?" I told him sometimes ppl just don't want cookies on their computer, etc.

To cheat at Wordle

At preschool pickup this week, a classmate of our daughter walked by, and our daughter said:

“Well, she’s living her best life!”

(she sometimes picks up phrases like that without quite knowing what they mean)

We were driving into bright sunshine this morning and the eldest one said "Ah. The sun. My beloathed."

goth?

That's amazing.

Local news was on the TV, due to fires nearby (we don't normally have the news on). My kid:

"Why is he standing in front of a fire, and talking to the camera?"
– It's the news, he's reporting from the scene.
"Isn't that breaking the fourth wall?"

Sometimes they do the darnedest things: apparently a 2nd grader at my kid's school took $1400 from his grandmother's purse and passed it all out to his classmates yesterday.

Grandma's just holding $1400 in cash?

showing me a lego house she built and describing the owner of the house:

"She's allergic to white whipped cream so she takes blue whipped cream instead and she believes in magical creatures"

7 year old: "Dad, one of the sentences in my homework isn't age-appropriate."

"What does it say?"

"'The young couple looked for apples.'"

"Why is that inappropriate?"

"Do you know what it means?"

"I think I do?"

"What?"

"Well, I know what 'young' means, and I know what 'couple' means..."

"Yeah that's not appropriate. What does that mean?"

"Maybe it's two 25 year-olds who just got married.""

"No. No. 25 is not young. A young couple is not age-appropriate."

I remember how my daughter, upon hearing the term "young adult" asked how you can be both young and an adult.

5 year old Opal is obsessed with Greek Mythology. Listening to a podcast called "Greeking Out".

I don't remember how it came up, I think we were talking about constellations but I said "when I die will you send me up to the starts to become a constellation?"

she said "no dad, i can't do that, I'm not Zeus!"

I said oh ok. Then she said "but I can dig a grave for you, I'd do that for you"

I said thank you, that's very nice, assuming I want to be buried. You know a lot of people get cremated, and then their family can sprinkle their ashes somewhere important to them, like their favorite spot in the woods or by the ocean.

She said "I can do that for you" and I said "where would you sprinkle my ashes" and she said "in my room! So you can be with me forever!"

xxp I was predicting there was going to be some hip modern sexual slang meaning of "apples"

Lol yeah, my first thought was that he was making some sort of Adam and Eve connection.

xp I'm fascinated with the way kids react to the idea of death; my older one never wanted to talk about it (and still doesn't) after asking a few heartbreaking questions about it when he first started to get a sense of what is was (when a spider gets eaten by a bird can it still make webs? do even *pet* dogs and fish die?); my younger one is totally matter-of-fact about it except that he'll rarely use the word "die," preferring "destroyed" instead for some reason. Once he asked me how farmers are able to turn a cow into steak before the cow realizes what's going on and it kind of made me want to go vegetarian again.

my son (7) is learning about it too. I think someone (maybe me!) told him that people die when they hit 100 so now every birthday he tells the person when they are going to die. My grandma just hit 92 and his reaction was "wow! she's going to die soon!"

Yes! My kid thought that too. He had a period of wanting to find out everyone's ages and then telling everyone who would die soonest.

xxp he also asked 'how do they turn water fish into eating fish?' after watching a programme about how they make fishfingers.

Not mine, but too good not to share —

A friend told us today about having the sex talk with her son recently; when she told him it’s a private, personal thing between two people, he said:

“Yeah, I know… the doctor leaves the room while they do it.”

when i was a kid i totally thought grownups went to the hospital or a special place to have sex. i mean if babies were born there, in this like, controlled setting, then it stood to reason that you’d want to start the process there too

xp ha, that's great!

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-do-philosophy-for-and-with-children

Kid: "Remember last year, when I played baseball, and had two strikes and three balls?"
Me: Yeah.
Kid: "That's kind of unnatural, right? To have three balls?"
Me: ...... that was actually kind of funny. Did you make it up yourself?
Kid: (with a proud grin) "Yes!"

literally everything in the world according to my 13yo is either “sus” or “brazy”, nothing inbetween