Kids say the darndest things

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

felt old, looked up brazy in urban dictionary: "a step above redonkulous"

turns out i am cooler than tracer's 13-yr-old kid after all

“sus” or “brazy”, nothing inbetween

the new C or D

but which is which? sus used to be suspicious i.e. bad, is it still? or is it now bad meaning good? or something else?

not gnna fess up to how long i scrolled thru the among us memes to find a good response to this question

Someone just ordered a Chinese Chicken Salad; my kid asked, “What’s the difference between one of our chickens and a chicken raised in China?”

Isn’t Brazy Blood-speak?

probably - he is obsessed with 90s rap and gangster culture

(while playing giant jenga)

I just danced in fear like my husband was going to die that very minute!

watching a silent movie

daughter: Why isn't there any talking in this movie?
Me: Because this is a really old movie
daughter: People didn't know how to talk then?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/07/e0/19/07e0199b9ccc36436de3b1d38e8f045d.jpg

lol i was picturing that Calvin & Hobbes too!!

yeah, after the fact it occurred to me that I could have done a whole bit similar to that Calvin & Hobbes strip

love this email I got from summer camp about my son:

"He mentioned that he saw a cloaked figure in the Camp space which then disappeared. I told him that the stories need to stop, but he mentioned that they were true."

lol the word "mentioned" is doing a lot of work in that sentence to maintain the facade of casualness. as someone who has spent a lot of summers working at camps, i am very familiar with the delicate dance of trying to communicate with parents in a low key way about things for which children are the ones establishing the level of drama and intensity

randomly overheard as my daughters were playing together:

"I found your baby! It was under some other babies!"

"Well making gelatin shouldn't hurt the pigs because their hooves are made of solid wood" - opal age 5 1/2

no idea where she got that idea from.

girls are apparently now “beanies”

“when I was a baby I didn’t have hands because babies don’t have hands”

My 9-year-old daughter, after explaining to her that soccer is called football in Europe.

"Well football is "foot" and "ball" so makes sense for soccer. "Soccer" doesn't mean anything, couldn't soccer and football just trade names so that it's less confusing for everybody?"

I told her that was a very good idea.

My 8 yo said he left me a message in the bathroom. I went in and saw written on the fogged up mirror, "Daddy, I will haunt you forever."

Casper, 4 and a half and a bit, while I was trying to put his jumper on him this morning as he was drawing:

“Don’t interrupt me, I am doing good art.”

And seconds later, when I tried again:

“Once again you have interrupted me while I am doing art.”

You’ve raised a poster, my friend

"When was ancient Greece? Was it in 1981?"

We're reading a book:

"These kids are in 4th grade and they don't know what a crematory is?"

Three-year-old comes up to me while I'm taking my vitamin pills, says "Daddy is that your fart medicine?"

"i wish it was"

“it’s not that deep daddy”

Opal's latest thing is insisting we compare everything and make a choice. Like she'll hold up two little toys and say "which one is your favorite" or she'll hold up a few rocks and say "daddy which one do you like best" and if that's not annoying enough when you choose she asks you to explain why when half the time you don't care at all and even worse is sometimes you'll make a choice and she'll say "no you can't choose that one" and it's just all day long doing this.

The other night she said "daddy which do you like better?" and I don't even remember what it was she was asking me to compare and choose between but they weren't even the same thing so I responded, with a bit of genuine frustration and anger "Opal, I really don't have an opinion and I can't keep choosing when you keep getting mad if I choose the wrong thing and these two things aren't even in the same category it's like trying to compare apples and oranges" and before I realized what I had just walked into, Opal said...

"daddy which do you like better, apples or oranges?"

At least that was an easy one, I said oranges and she said "me too" and I said good night.

Haha! With our 8-y-o we are now in the realm of Guess My Top 20 footballers in the world ever, in the correct order. And his rankings change frequently, and often it’s a player I’ve never heard of from a team I don’t care much about, chosen because his dad used to play for Leicester Who Are The Best Obviously or something.

The other day my daughter asked me why there isn't a "random" elevator button which will just bring you to a random floor

GOOD QUESTION

I took my son to his first basketball game and he was wondering if the numbers on their jerseys meant how old they were

I was in the bathroom and my almost-3-year-old says through the door, "Daddy, the fire is on in my room" - my heart skipped a beat as I probed for clarification... she had turned on the humidifier (humidi-fire).

awww

reminds me of when my son was 3 or 4, he was in the basement and he comes up and says "Daddy, it's raining in the basement". I immediately went to ILX to post in this thread until I found out a pipe had burst and it really was raining in the basement

joe - i like to make jokes, to make people happy. i just want people to be happy.
ivy - well, i'm not that way. i'm all for fighting.

girls are apparently “beanies”