Diarina

One sign of being a parent is how much you adore your child's mispronunciations and mis-phrasings. "Next by" as in "Daddy, sit next by me," has already entered my own vocabulary, often prompting curious looks.

Even though most of these are wrong, they're cute enough that we resisted correcting The Littlest Critic for as long as we could, just because we were so smitten.

Amial. This was a long-running favorite for "animal." It was so darn cute, that we said it all the time. The day the next door neighbor girl taught my daughter the correct way to pronounce it was a bitter, bitter day for us indeed. Thanks a lot, Nicole.

More Betterer. It's almost a trifecta of grammatical badness, but hilarious to me and The Wife.

Firteen. Fifteen. Seventeen. Homonyms or near homonyms are a great stumbling block and TLC is of the opinion that if a number sounds sorta like another number than simply repeating sound-alikes is a waste of time.

Thirty-ten. Another bit of number fun is what happens after you count past thirty-nine.

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-123-456-789-39-11. For about a week, every time she sung the number song, this segued into number salad.

Pewter. What you're reading this on right now.

K-Mark. That giant red K, of course it's a mark, silly.

Wiwwy Boyw. As a rule, I don't care much for Veggie Tales cartoons, for reasons obvious to anyone who knows me. Plus, the voices of the characters is intensely grating, especially the French accented one. At any rate, as I don't make a big deal out of it or anything, TLC has seen a few of these. One repeating character-fantasy on this cartoon is when Larry the Cucumber becomes a superhero by name of Larry Boy. For months, whenever TLC said "Wiwwy Boyw" we tried in vain to figure out what the heck she was saying. Willy Boy? Really Boy? Whirly Boy? All r's, l's, and w's sounded exactly the same, which lead to much laughing – and some temper tantrums.

Songs are too numerous to mention in general, as she hits funny notes in almost all of her singing, mishearing and repeating back bad versions of lyrics. A couple favorites:

Police Naughty Dot. This Jose Feliciano Christmas carol was sung at her very first Holiday Program at TLC's school. I tried to suggest to her the correct form, but she insisted, loudly and forcefully that the real song was "Police Naughty Dot." The remaining lyrics defy transcription but remind me of Pentecostal church hysterias.

"I spy what I spy with my secret agent TIE." Another mishearing that simply can't be reasoned away. A bow-tie wearing cartoon penguin is singing about being a Secret Agent. Obviously he spies with his EYE, but that hard T at the end of the line has convinced my daughter that his bowtie is some kind of spy gadget. He never uses the tie for any spy purposes and when I tried to point out the game "I spy with my little eye," she wasn't having any of it. She insisted that there was a camera of some kind inside the bowtie. Well, since I couldn't prove that there wasn't, I had to admit defeat.

Finally, the title of the post. Amazing how adorable you can find your kid while they're desperately sick and miserable with a stomach flu, but there it is. I'm sure there are tons I've forgotten about and I meant to do this last night at home where I have a bunch written down, so it's likely there'll be an update.