The Parent Tax

#1 Heather

Fake. No child uses words like that. “Consecutive years”, “Strongly suspicious”….riiiiight.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:00 pm rating: 38 small thumbs up

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#1.1 Kaz

Her parents may use words like that all the time. Kids pick up words that they hear. My two year old says suspicious all the time because it’s a word I use often

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:03 pm rating: 192
#1.2 LM

Agreed. Kids use much bigger words than you would think

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:11 pm rating: 97
#1.3 Michelle Grove

Mine do! It’s HILARIOUS!

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:14 pm rating: 45
#1.4 RubySun

I am just interested to know why you use the word ‘suspicious’ so much… Are you a cop?

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:24 pm rating: 27
#1.5 Uly

They do if the people around them do. Stop dumbing down your vocabulary and your kids will shape up.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:27 pm rating: 169
#1.6 Sen

I did when I was a kid. Then again when I was growing up and got bored, the options my mother gave me were “read a book” or “read the dictionary”…(not that the dictionary isn’t a book, but you know.)

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:31 pm rating: 44
#1.7 Rattus

When I was eight my three favourite books were 1984, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Springing of George Blake. I think I could probably have managed those words. Though not to my dad – he scared the shit out of me.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:53 pm rating: 36
#1.8 N

By grade 2 I was throwing around words like “Acknowledgement” (and probably still making casual spelling errors) because I paid closer attention to learning/spelling hard words. It took me years to spell smaller words like “weird” and “embarass” correctly. And it’s easy to carelessly misspell words like “present” because the “e” can have an “a” sound when the word is pronounced.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:59 pm rating: 17
#1.9 Poltergeist

What did I tell you guys? Every time a note written by a child is submitted, somebody has to call it a fake. We might have broken the record this time, though – it only took one post! First cats and now this? Heather, you must know damn near everything there is to know about anything!

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:34 pm rating: 52
#1.10 weaselby

I can’t help myself, please forgive me…it’s “embarrass.” :p

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:40 pm rating: 37
#1.11 angie

I never once dumbed down my language for my daughter. If she didn’t understand a word, she asked, and I clarified. Talk to children like people, not animals, and they’ll pick up all sorts of words. Sometimes, not hte ones you want them to.

Jul 30, 2012 at 7:24 pm rating: 68
#1.12 Jami

When I was 3 I called my brothers “despicable.” I learned it from Daffy Duck.

Jul 30, 2012 at 8:27 pm rating: 74
#1.13 jbanana

Don’t you mean “desssssssshpicable”?

Jul 30, 2012 at 10:33 pm rating: 43
#1.14 a-Arialist

The kid is obviously in a complete huff and using the biggest, snottiest words she can possibly think of, on purpose. Kids who read, or whose parents read to them, know these words.

Jul 31, 2012 at 2:58 am rating: 76
#1.15 Peter

Heathers comment reminds me of a time when I was 15 and just starting A-levels. A teacher got me to stand up and read something I’d written because she thought it must have been plagiarised and presumably that I wouldn’t even be able to read it fluently. Suffice to say, my expectations of the work to drug-taking ratio required of me for the next two years was significantly revised as a result.

Jul 31, 2012 at 4:39 am rating: 26
#1.16 anatai

My parents were both English majors. I totally would have written a note like this.

Jul 31, 2012 at 11:43 am rating: 8
#1.17 meg

It’s totally plausible.

My best friend’s almost 3-year-old was sitting in the floor with a picture book (had words, but she was holding it upside down and was whispering to herself her own story) while her mother and I were chatting rather animatedly, I suppose. In a huff, her daughter sets down her book and says to us, “MOMMY. CAN YOU PLEASE BE QUIET? I’M TRYING TO CONCENTRATE!”

Her mother looks at me, I look back at her. Did her not even 3-year-old daughter just tell us to be quiet, and more importantly, said “concentrate” and knew what it meant. Of course we started laughing about that, and the poor kid thought we were laughing at her, got mad and said “FINE. I’M GOING TO MY ROOM!” I tell her mother that her toddler is suddenly a teenager.

tl;dr Kids say the darnest things. This isn’t fake.

Jul 31, 2012 at 12:12 pm rating: 24
#1.18 Goldie

One of my sons wrote a horror story in class in 2nd grade. His teacher gave him a time out, underlined all “inappropriate” words and sent the story home to me. When I called her and asked why “levitating” was an inappropriate word, she responded with a lecture about how a second-grader isn’t supposed to know these words and “what are you exposing him to?” Turns out, she didn’t know what the word meant. So, yeah, nothing fake about this note, unless my son’s 2nd grade teacher claims to have written it — in that case, I call shenanigans.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:04 pm rating: 60
#1.19 Beatus Mongous

@RubySun, kind of suspicious, don’t you think?

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:27 pm rating: 1
#1.20 Poltergeist

Goldie, I hope you gave that idiot teacher a piece of your mind. What a fool.

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:46 pm rating: 26
#1.21 Amy In Toronto

Maybe Mom and/or Dad are lawyers. Or prolific Scrabble players. Or people who have a zest for language and vocabulary.

My parents were both teachers. My father (the science teacher) would conduct regular experiments on me and my older sister to see what sorts of weird, trivia factoids we could retain.

In my first week of junior kindergarten at age 4, my teacher led the class in a spirited round of nursery rhyme singing. I followed the melody but had no idea what my classmates were singing. My version was completely different. As the voices quieted down until I was the only left singing, my teacher heard:

Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific!
Fane would I fathom thy nature’s specific.
Perched up high upon thy ether capacious,
Strongly resembling a gem carbonacious.

Aug 1, 2012 at 1:10 pm rating: 58
#1.22 notolaf

I think this would have more likes if more people were able to read it. XD

Aug 5, 2012 at 8:27 pm rating: 4
#1.23 liltam

My son used to say aggrevated at 2 because I used that word all the time. Kids are parrots.

Aug 17, 2012 at 2:22 pm rating: 1

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#2 greth

at least it’s well written!

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:00 pm rating: 7 small thumbs up

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#3 nativefloridian

Not sure you want it back now. It’s been 6 months.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:01 pm rating: 26 small thumbs up

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#4 dianamight

This kid seems kind of awesome… Good for her for calling out her dad in such a well thought out way. Makes me feel all hopeful for the future.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:01 pm rating: 78 small thumbs up

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#4.1 JK

My dad got me a 3 lb bag of peppermints for Christmas once. Why, not sure. In retrospect it seems like an odd choice to make even though I enjoyed them. I don’t know why Callie’s dad felt the need to take her candy. It’s been scientifically proven, sugar doesn’t make children more hyperactive. What happens when you tell parents their kids have eaten sugar is that they attribute normal childhood behavior to the sugar. When kids ate no sugar, but parents were told they did, they reported higher hyperactivity. It’s all in your heads, folks. Give Callie her candy! PS. Make sure she brushes, sugar still causes cavities.

PS. I did get other presents. Not just a giant bag of candy. Felt the need to clarify that.

Jul 30, 2012 at 8:08 pm rating: 28
#4.2 Jami

Either -

A: Dad wants to eat it himself – though because it’s been there fore 6 months that’s not likely.

B: Dad is a bit of a health nut and doesn’t want the kids to have any sugar, ever, but mom lets them go trick or treating, and this was his sneaky way to thwart mom’s attempts to let the kids have sugar. Though in that case why he wouldn’t throw it away is beyond me. Unless mom likes to go through the garbage to see who’s been doing what.

Because some parents are just – weird.

Jul 30, 2012 at 8:34 pm rating: 16
#4.3 DaveGI

I would add:

C: Dad – and possibly Mom as well – don’t mind the kids having some Halloween candy, but in moderation. So if the kids get too much of the stuff on Halloween the parents portion some out over a few days and hide the balance. If the kids ask, they tell them “But you ate it all!”

I’m pretty sure my mother did this to my brother and I, and I know for a fact my aunts and uncles did this to my younger cousins.

In this case either the parents didn’t like the candy that was left, or they forgot where they stashed it in their room.

Jul 31, 2012 at 4:56 pm rating: 13
#4.4 girl_with_all_the_yarn

@JK, finally! Someone else who understands that the sugar/hyperactivity thing is a myth! It drives me bonkers when people still claim it’s a thing. I mean, you wouldn’t add more gas to your car to make it go faster. Sugar is not a stimulant.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:36 pm rating: 18
#4.5 Jami

You could be right, Dave. I just go off personal experience. My parents expected me to ration my own candy. (We can see how well that worked. LOL) But it also helped that I’ve always been an extremely picky eater, even as an adult (plus have a lot of food allergies) so there were things I wouldn’t eat even if you paid me. So while I may ended up eating all of what I saw as “the good stuff” in one night, there was always 1/4 to 1/2 of the bag I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.

Meanwhile I had a friend in elementary school who’s parents were vegans to such an extreme the girl wasn’t even allowed to eat nuts or most soy products. Even other vegans thought they were insane. The girl was always having all sorts of dizzy spells and the shakes. (Meanwhile her brother was always sneaking off to Sizzler for their all you can eat ribs special.) And I know from my mom watching that stupid wife shop show (and then telling me all about it no matter how many times I tell her I just do not care) there’s a lot of parents who are just that controlling about food.

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:43 pm rating: 9
#4.6 Ruth

Can I just point out that there’s no such thing as “vegans to such an extreme” that they don’t eat nuts or soy. Lots of health nuts shun soy (for stupid reasons), and some people are allergic. Many people are allergic to nuts, and I’ve heard people say that they don’t let their kids have nuts because it makes them more likely to develop an allergy, though this has been disproved and only ever theoretically applied to infants in the first place. Restrictive diets like this are often tried out because a kid has health problems, especially if, like in your example, the sibling could eat anything (autism, epilepsy… all kinds of things). But it was nothing to do with veganism.

Or they could have been weird controls freaks, too! I was only thinking of the legitimate or semi-legitimate reasons.

Aug 1, 2012 at 5:53 am rating: 5
#4.7 Jami

No, they were seriously weird control freaks. The kids weren’t allowed any reasonable source of vegan approved protein. NEITHER child was suppose to eat these things, especially meat. I know from going to birthday parties there. The boy was eating meat behind his parent’s backs.

Aug 1, 2012 at 1:24 pm rating: 12
#4.8 t-rex

Or, it could be dad forgot where he hid the candy, and tried to cover the loss with a lie.

Aug 15, 2012 at 3:00 pm rating: 0

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#5 Meggo

I find it interesting that the writer seemed unable to spell both “where” and “present” correctly, yet managed to spell the words “suspicious” and “consecutive” perfectly.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:04 pm rating: 8 small thumbs up

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#5.1 Jen

Some kids are taught to look up how to spell words if they don’t know how. Clearly she made a mistake on “consecutive” the first time and tried it again.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:13 pm rating: 49
#5.2 Anna

That was my thought as well.

Jul 30, 2012 at 7:03 pm rating: 0
#5.3 Saph

That totally restores a little bit of my faith in humanity.

Aug 1, 2012 at 12:01 am rating: 2

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#6 Smokey

Spelling words

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:12 pm rating: 3 small thumbs up

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#7 RubySun bang

Perhaps this girl is highly intelligent. It isn’t uncommon for very clever children to mess up spelling of easier words, and spell difficult words correctly. Letter could be a fake, but quite possibly is not!

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:21 pm rating: 26 small thumbs up

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#7.1 Caiman

That’s how I was as a child. My mother tells me I had an astonishing command of the English language…and yet I recall having to ask a teacher how to spell ‘used’ in the third grade.

Jul 30, 2012 at 9:23 pm rating: 16
#7.2 jadefirefly

I won spelling bees in grade / middle school. I was reading chapter books in first grade – and not Curious George chapter books, either. I consistently topped the charts in standardized testing for English all through school.

I was 27 before someone pointed out I’d been spelling ‘weird’ wrong.

Sometimes we miss the little things.

Jul 31, 2012 at 3:10 am rating: 31
#7.3 redheadwglasses

My brilliant freshman classmate Bobby once turned to me and asked, “How do you spell ‘of’? U-V?” He was a horrible speller. It’s like his brain just wasn’t wired to do it.

Jul 31, 2012 at 12:43 pm rating: 4

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#8 Deb

Team Callie! That dad needs to give the stolen goods back. Jeez.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:23 pm rating: 42 small thumbs up

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#9 Deb Katz

What a jaded world we live in. No one wants to let go and think for a second this could be real. No one wants to let anyone get one over on them. Just enjoy the effing letter and the intention with which it was published. It’s not science. Kids can be bright. Yeesh *kicks cat on the way out*

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:41 pm rating: 62 small thumbs up

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#9.1 juju_skittles

Just to clarify – Was the cat on the way out, or is it an indoor cat?

Jul 30, 2012 at 10:23 pm rating: 61
#9.2 DaveGI

You monster! How could you let your cat outside? You should only kick your cat INSIDE!

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:06 pm rating: 19

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#10 Shannon Covel

I love that she made sure to include the date of the infraction.

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:43 pm rating: 53 small thumbs up

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#11 Mandy Brigwell

Seems real enough to me: mix of capitals and lowercase is consistent; handwriting is generally neat and shows evidence of joining. Vocabulary is occasionally ambitious, and shows phonic-based strategies for spelling unfamiliar words, which also explains why they’re correct whilst other words which should be known aren’t. The author is experimenting with punctuation other than FS&Caps, sometimes inaccurately, and makes use of connectives other than ‘and’. I’d say a high Level 3, based on the UK National Curriculum Levels. You lot have low expectations, I’ll tell you that…

Jul 30, 2012 at 5:55 pm rating: 69 small thumbs up

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#12 T

What if Dad bought his own candy?

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:01 pm rating: 1 small thumbs up

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#12.1 Kore

Callie knew it was hers because of the stickers! I assume they’re the same stickers she decorated the letter with.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:20 pm rating: 28
#12.2 weaselby

I love that she used the stickers. Highly developed sense of irony and justice.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:42 pm rating: 64
#12.3 kathryn

Why would Dad take her stickers away as well as the candy? What a big meanie: Team Callie, definitely.

Jul 31, 2012 at 3:12 pm rating: 17
#12.4 Poltergeist

The stickers were collateral damage.

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:54 pm rating: 5

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#13 sam

I love the use of the mentioned Halloween stickers! It pushes a letter over to passive aggressive and gives it a subtle layer of accusation that jsut screams, “EXHIBIT A!”

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:29 pm rating: 82 small thumbs up

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#13.1 The Elf

Exactly. It’s like providing proof of the crime. Daddy can’t deny it, because she has ….. the stickers!

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:02 am rating: 12
#13.2 DaveGI

The only thing that would have made it better is if she started the note off with “J’Accuse…!”

Clearly Callie has the moral high ground here.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:13 pm rating: 12

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#14 havingfitz

50 years from now. “What’s that, Dad? Your heart medicine? Oh, that’s long gone by now…”

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:34 pm rating: 86 small thumbs up

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#15 LOL

Teach your kid not to go snooping through your stuff.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:41 pm rating: 4 small thumbs up

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#15.1 Poltergeist

But it wasn’t his stuff; it was her stuff!

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:51 pm rating: 34
#15.2 Amy In Toronto

but then how else would we find our parents’ porn stash?

Aug 1, 2012 at 1:22 pm rating: 6

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#16 shwo! bang

Oh, thank zod it turned out to be candy in the bag. I was worried she had found his porn collection.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:46 pm rating: 68 small thumbs up

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#16.1 Dala

Exactly what I was thinking!

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:52 pm rating: 7
#16.2 The Elf

All starring a lovely Goth lady named “Candy”. I can see how she got confused.

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:03 am rating: 6
#16.3 DaveGI

I thought the same thing as I started reading it. Either porn or adult “toys”.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:14 pm rating: 2
#16.4 Beatus Mongous

Nah, Dad keeps his porn collection in the spare tire well in the trunk of his car.

At first I thought either porn or some letters a secret lover had written.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:32 pm rating: 1

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#17 valerie

Just… hilarious. Love that kid already.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:49 pm rating: 8 small thumbs up

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#18 Amy, UK

My daughter has just turned 8 and knows the difference between a metaphor and a simile. Apparently this is par for the course in an “inner city, deprived” school in Bristol UK. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

Jul 30, 2012 at 6:52 pm rating: 16 small thumbs up

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#18.1 Dyre

In the USA, English is barely taught at all in public school. The system teaches you how to write short stories, essays, &etc. while teaching minimal use of punctuation (forget anything “fancy” like semi-colons, colons, double dashes, or parentheses) and almost nothing about grammar (including which kinds of words are nouns, verbs, etc.).

It’s pathetic, really. There/Their/They’re, Your/You’re, and To/Two/Too don’t even get emphasised even though most people seem to struggle with them. Actually, I remember my misuse of “to”, instead of “too”, didn’t even get corrected. Ever.

Aug 12, 2012 at 6:05 am rating: 0

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#19 Lux

I totally would have used a word like “consecutive” when I was a kid. I was a precocious little shit. The only thing I wanted for Christmas when I was ten was the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. Although that may be considered more weird than precocious…

Jul 30, 2012 at 7:43 pm rating: 17 small thumbs up

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#20 Thunder McKing

What’s the deal with stealing the whole bag at once? Every parent knows you take the chocolate bars and good candy a few pieces at a time, but leave the generic stuff to throw them off.

Jul 30, 2012 at 7:45 pm rating: 39 small thumbs up

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#20.1 Poltergeist

I know, right? Seems like Callie is well on her way to becoming smarter than her father.

Jul 30, 2012 at 9:36 pm rating: 12
#20.2 H for Toy

What? I just took most of their chocolate and good candy at once. Then I told them it was my trick-or-treat candy. I guess they’re not old enough to realize that I wasn’t holding a bag that whole time.

Jul 30, 2012 at 10:20 pm rating: 5

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#21 Missiletoe

When I was in 9th grade there was an incident where someone wrote a hateful note advising to “shun” a teacher. The teacher’s rebuttal to this was that children our age shouldn’t know the word “shun”. We were completely outraged.

That still makes me mad.

Jul 30, 2012 at 8:09 pm rating: 43 small thumbs up

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#21.1 The Elf

And yet somewhat realistic. In my 9th grade honors English class, we started the year with a basic grammar test. Most of the class failed, even on the simple parts of speech. Seriously, you made it to 9th grade and you never figured out that a noun is a person, place, or thing?

It was then that I realized that “honors” doesn’t mean anything.

Jul 31, 2012 at 7:05 am rating: 11
#21.2 squib

During a boring study hour session of English class in the 7th grade, several of us little snots convinced a classmate to ask a teacher to define a word for him. When he inquired of the teacher, “Mrs. Smith, are you a fellatio?” she answered, “Larry, if I weren’t confident you are completely ignorant, you’d be in trouble for that.” Poor Larry.

Jul 31, 2012 at 9:17 am rating: 35
#21.3 Beatus Mongous

I had a friend in high school who performed fellatio on a teacher once.

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:36 pm rating: 2
#21.4 The Elf

A “friend”? Sure.

Aug 1, 2012 at 12:14 pm rating: 6
#21.5 Backa

@The Elf

To this day I have not figured out any worthy point to knowing what a noun is, what an adjective, or what an adverb is. Or for that matter, prepositional phrases, past participles, and all that other stuff. I read avidly. My writing was amazing. I read college level material at age 10 and received ridiculously high scores on all my papers, tested or otherwise (AP, SAT, regular papers, you get it). You don’t need to know any of that noun stuff in order to read and write exceptionally well. So if you could explain why anyone would “need” to know that stuff, please tell me.

Frankly, the only reason I ever bothered to figure out the difference between an adjective and an adverb was so I could play madlibs. Otherwise, the knowledge is useless. It won’t magically make anyone better at writing or reading unless all the other methods of education have failed on them. Hell, the only reason I didn’t get perfect on vocab tests was because there were always 4 questions asking me to mark which syllable has the stress. I mean, what the hell? Who cares? We know how to talk, no normally developed person actively thinks “well, ‘individual’ has the stress on THIS syllable so I say it like SO”….really makes no sense. So I’d just randomly pick a syllable for the stress and every so often I guessed right 4 times…and if I made 4 wrong answers I still got an A anyway since they were so few. Plenty of what’s taught in english classes does not make the language any easier to use.

Aug 10, 2012 at 10:17 pm rating: 2
#21.6 Gwan

This may not be a valid reason for you, but it is a good foundation for learning other languages, in which it is usually fairly vital to know what part of speech something is (since you won’t know how to do things like put it in the right place in a sentence or inflect the endings instinctively, plus it just makes it a lot easier to understand the textbooks). On the other hand, I think learning other languages has also helped my own understanding of some of the more arcane bits of English grammar (gerunds, subjunctives, etc.)

Aug 19, 2012 at 6:10 am rating: 3

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#22 Sioux

Is nobody else relieved this ended the way it did. When I first read that she found ‘a library bag’ hidden away in Dad’s stuff I expected far worse than halloween candy.

Jul 30, 2012 at 11:50 pm rating: 17 small thumbs up

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#23 AussieGuest

Team Callie and Team sweet tooth !!

Jul 31, 2012 at 2:26 am rating: 3 small thumbs up

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#24 Don't lie to your kids!

If you’re going to steal from your kids, be upfront about it. “I’m making a rule that you can keep x amount of candy because of y” is reasonable. Lying to your kid is shitty.

Jul 31, 2012 at 8:20 am rating: 25 small thumbs up

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#25 Dane Zeller

So…this little girl is crying over her losing the candy she obtained under threat of trick, by dressing up to hide her identity from her neighbors, and in a quantity that she would never be able to consume without developing diabetes. I say she got what she deserved, and she was saved from a chronic disease by her hero father. (In my opinion.)

Jul 31, 2012 at 8:33 am rating: 8 small thumbs up

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#25.1 Ruth

Diabetes doesn’t work that way. If it did don’t you think forcefeeding of sugar would be used as a punishment or torture? Use your imagination.

Aug 1, 2012 at 6:00 am rating: 9
#25.2 Chris Miller

lol shit do I have diabetes and no one told me?

Aug 3, 2012 at 3:19 am rating: 2

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#26 oi

This kid is going to be a court recorder or historian or lawyer. Her penchant of exact timing of events is just so adorable!

Jul 31, 2012 at 9:35 am rating: 18 small thumbs up

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#27 The Elf

I also love that she was “looking for a hole punch” in a library bag. That’s where I put my office supplies!

Jul 31, 2012 at 9:42 am rating: 12 small thumbs up

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#28 cole

+1 for the stickers.

Jul 31, 2012 at 10:04 am rating: 7 small thumbs up

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#29 aivilo

I have a daughter who is approximately the same age as the note writer here … their handwriting is very similar. Adults can’t mimic a child’s handwriting very well, it always comes across as staged. I think that this is a very real, very well written note – and something that my daughter would write if she found her hidden Halloween candy. (Which she didn’t, because I ate it all).

Jul 31, 2012 at 10:39 am rating: 27 small thumbs up

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#30 Bookmark

It’s not strange at all to think this girl might know these words. When I was a kid, my mom would never tell me what words meant, instead telling me to look them up. I would carry a dictionary around with me sometimes. By the time I was 8, my favorite books were Watership Down, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and a handful of Michael Crichton novels.

My teachers would ask if I was really reading the books or just bringing large books to class to look impressive, but they stopped asking once book reports were due. And I do remember being frustrated that almost no one knew many of the words that I did.

Jul 31, 2012 at 12:07 pm rating: 12 small thumbs up

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#31 Adam

My 2 year 5 month old told me this morning her sock wasn’t “Comfortable”. So that kid could use suspicious and consecutive.

Jul 31, 2012 at 2:21 pm rating: 8 small thumbs up

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#32 Goldie

Okay, now that we’ve thoroughly discussed Callie’s vocabulary, I really need to know… what’s an “a-hole puncher” and where can I get one? I find myself in need of one pretty frequently.

Also, silly Dad – you should’ve taken that candy to work months ago. Free candy + bonus points with colleagues for being a team player + kid never finds out. We, parents of modern-day teenagers, did this for many consecutive years, and not once did any of our kids get suspicious!

Jul 31, 2012 at 5:00 pm rating: 24 small thumbs up

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#32.1 redheadwglasses

It’s not “a hole puncher” — that’s a scribble in front of her first usage of “hole puncher.”

And yes! As a nonparent, I support parents’ raiding of their kids’ halloween candy and bringing it to work. Also, Easter candy.

Aug 2, 2012 at 7:32 am rating: 3