What's in a name?

Yes, you may have noticed a little bit of a lag in blogging lately.  And yes, a "little bit of a lag" may mean that I've basically dropped it completely over the last, um, year.  I have excuses, but only a few are good and none are interesting to write about, so let's just pretend I've haven't ignored this little patch of the inter-garden for the past season, chop our way through the weeds and move on.  I'll try to get back to posting regularly, but for now, here's a quick snippet.

To ease back into things I just must record some things both Dalton and Belle have said recently that have made me laugh more times than I can count.

One day all of us were outside playing in the hose and Jason kept teasing Dalton and soaking him. In an effort to tease Jason back, Dalton yelled, "Daddy, you are a moron with a cow!"

Which made Jason and I die laughing.  First of all, we'd never heard him say moron in his life.  And then "with a cow"?  What?

So we joked about it for a little while.  Well, actually we laughed and laughed and Jason and I called each other morons with cows for about the next, um, couple days.  But we did pull it together and after finding out Dalton didn't know what moron meant, we explained the word and that he shouldn't call people that and don't use words you don't understand.  You know, all the other good parenting things we had to say in an attempt to make up for our first response.


Which leads us to the conversation I had with Belle:

Me: "Belle, I know Daddy and I were laughing about it, but I don't want you to call people morons.  It's not nice.  Do you know what it means?"

Belle: "No."

Me:  "It means they are not smart.  That they are stupid.  So I don't want to hear you calling anyone a moron, ok?"

Belle shifting a little and looking confused:  "Well, ok, Mommy...But then what do we call the morons?"

And I died laughing and had to leave the room.