Just Some Cute Things

I’ve been feeling a little melancholy lately, so I decided to give myself a little boost and I thought about the kids in my life.
I am the mother of five, grandmother of two, aunt to many nieces and nephews, babysitter to some, and I was a teacher’s aide in a Kindergarten class for a few years. These are just some of the cute/funny/silly/nonsense things I’ve collected from some of them:

• Our oldest son Brian was only fourteen months old when our son Erik was born, Brian was just starting to toddle around and just starting to talk. When we brought Erik home from the hospital I asked him if he wanted to see the baby, he came over to look, he pointed at him, and he said, “Pup Pup”. That’s what he called the neighbor’s dog.

• Our sons Brian and Erik were about three and four at the time, they were sitting at the kitchen table and I was getting lunch ready for them. The front door to the apartment was open and it was getting cold, so I asked Brian to please go close the door so a draft couldn’t get in. He was getting down off his chair to do so when Erik started to coax him along, “Hurry, Brian, hurry! Hurry up, Brian, hurry!” He began to get frantic and yelling, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” I asked him what was wrong, and he hollered, “Hurry up, Brian, close the door so the giraffe can’t get in!”

• At one time we owned a summer cabin in the woods and I was staying there with our five kids and also my niece and nephew were staying with me at the time, I was alone with the kids during the week and my husband would come up on the weekends. Sometimes the weeks in between the weekends felt longer than others. It was an afternoon during one of those long weeks that my son Brian came in from playing in the backyard with the other kids, he was holding his head and told me that my niece Erin had hit him in the head with a horseshoe. When I asked him if it was an accident he said no that she had done it on purpose. I went out back and asked Erin if that were true and she said yes. I yelled at her and asked her, “Why would you do such a thing?” She answered me, “Because he told me to throw it at him.” I asked Brian if that was so and he said, “Yeah, we lost the stakes for the horseshoes so I was being the stake.” I apologized to Erin for yelling at her.

• Another time at the cabin we had another nephew staying with us. In the area of the cabin there was a large Hasidic Community, we were riding in the car and we passed a Hasidic man walking along side of the road, the man happened to have bright red/orange hair under a tall hat, and my nephew asked, “Aunt Eileen, is that a leprechaun?”

• Our youngest son was only about two when we purchased our cabin and he used to call it the cabinet.

• Our daughter Katie was about two and I was running a bath for her, the water was too hot so I was adding cold water and I was stirring the water with my hand, the water kept moving after I took my hand out and I turned to put Katie in the tub and she said, “Look, Mommy, the water is doing this.” And she had her hands on her hips and was swaying back and forth, doing a little hula dance.

• Another time at about that same age Katie was playing hide-and-go-seek with my husband and she said to him, “Okay, Daddy, now you close your eyes and I’ll go hide under the bed.”

• Katie used to pull on my face and say, “Mommy, look at me, not the TV!”

• Our youngest daughter Ellie was three when our youngest son Andrew was born. She was crazy about him, but her loving was a little too rough sometimes. She would sing, “Oh, I love this baby so much”, and then she’d proceed to put him in a strangle-hold of a hug. I guess we reprimanded her too much because one day when my parents were visiting my Mom asked Ellie if she loved her new brother and she said, “No, I’m not allowed to love him!”

• When Ellie was in Kindergarten she came home one day so mad because they were having a Christmas play and she got the part of an angel, and it wasn’t a speaking part, and she really wanted a speaking part. I told her she would just have to be happy with what she got. She stamped her foot and said, “I’m going to pray for a speaking part.” So I figured she’d find out early that sometimes God says no. She came home from school the next day and told me she had the part of Mary! I asked her what happened and she said the little girl that was playing Mary didn’t want to do it so the teacher picked Ellie instead! I guess God showed me.

• The day before my thirty-fifth birthday I said to my youngest son who was three at the time, “Tomorrow when I wake up I’ll be an old lady.” The next morning Andrew came into my room and he said (very surprised), “Mommy, you look the same!” I didn’t realize what he was talking about until he reminded me of what I had said.

• Andrew used to love to eat Vienna Finger cookies when he was little and one day unbeknownst to me my husband teased him that he was going to get a fat tummy if he didn’t watch out, and my husband then proceeded to stick his stomach way out and told Andrew it was from eating ‘cookie fingers’ as Andrew called them. Andrew was refusing to eat any of his favorite cookies after that and when I asked him what was wrong he started crying saying, “I don’t want to get fat!” I asked him who would be so mean to tell him that he’d get fat and he said, “Daddy!”

• My son Erik told us a cute story the other day about our granddaughter Mia (she's not quite two years old yet). They were sitting down at the table and Erik had brought home something to eat from the store, he took it out of the bag and broke off a piece to give Mia, he put it on her plate, and then he himself was going to eat the rest of it over the bag. Mia tried to share her plate with him and he said, “No, Mia, that’s okay, I’ll just use the bag.” Mia thought he was saying something about himself being bad, so she said, “Oh, no, Daddy, you’re not bad, you’re the sweetest, sweetest Daddy.”

• When she is at our house Mia loves for me to run with her. Every time she’s here she says “Run, Grandma, run!” and so we run until Grandma is tired. Then I say to her, “No more, Mia, Grandma is too old and too tired. I can’t run anymore.” One day I settled her and my grandson down at a little table and chairs with some Play-doh and Mia wanted me to sit on one of the tiny chairs and I told her no, I couldn’t, and before I could finish my sentence Mia said, “Oh, you’re too old and too tired to sit here.” Now any time I say no to her about something Mia tells me I’m too old and too tired.

• In the Kindergarten class where I worked the teacher had a Phonics book and in it were pictures, they were sort of hand drawn cartoon pictures. One picture was of a man, it was a construction worker, and one of the little boys was looking intently at this picture, and he made his hands into binoculars and was looking at the picture through his hands, I asked Kevin what he was doing and he said to me, “Well, this guy looks very familiar to me and I’m trying to figure out who he is.”

• Another time we were using the same book, and in this exercise you had to cross out the things that didn’t belong. One page was a picture of a teacher and the children were supposed to circle the things she needed and cross out the things she wouldn’t use in her classroom. I noticed Kevin was crossing out the box of chalk and I asked him why he was crossing it out and he said to me, “Well, I know she doesn’t smoke so she doesn’t need this box of cigarettes here.”

• One day the teacher, Debbie, and I had lots of paperwork to do, so Debbie gave the students some playtime. Little Joseph came up to us and said, “We were talking about you two at the dinner table last night.” Debbie and I looked at each other, and Debbie asked, “Was it good or was it bad?” And Joseph said, “Well, it was a little bit good and a little bit bad. I told my Mommy that I loved her a lot, and I loved you two a little bit. And then I told her that she had very big boobies, and that you (he pointed to Debbie) had medium boobies, and that you (pointing to me now) had very, little, tiny boobies.” Out of the mouth of babes!

• One year we had a little boy that just could not sit in his seat. If he wasn’t getting up out of it, Nicholas was falling out of it. One day I said to him, “Nicholas, what’s going on with you?” And he answered, “I don’t know! This seat won’t keep me in it!”

• Another boy, Allessandro, couldn’t keep his hands to himself, he was always taking toys from the other kids, taking school supplies off my desk, or trying to hit the other children. I said to him one day when he was being particularly obnoxious, “Allessandro, don’t you want to be a good boy? Don’t you want to make Mommy happy? Don’t you want to make your teacher happy?” And he said, very dramatically, with hand gestures, in his little Italian accent, “Yes! Yes! I want to be a good boy! Yes! Yes! I want to make everybody happy! I want to make the whole world happy! Yes! Yes! Are you happy now?!”

• We had another little girl one year that was trouble with a capital T, she not only tried to hit the other kids, she would have full-blown meltdowns, throwing desks, hitting Debbie and myself, kicking, biting, scratching, screaming. Brianna was hard work, but she could also be the sweetest thing. I started a ‘good girl sticker chart’ for her, and I told her if she was good and she filled the chart with stickers, at the end of the week I would bring her a treat. She asked what kind of treat and I promised her anything she wanted (I was desperate!), so she smiles slyly at me, and I’m thinking, oh no, I’m in trouble here, then she raises her eyebrows up and down, and rubs her stomach, and asks, “A can of black olives?” I bought her two cans.

• One day I had the class in the playroom and one little boy was taking a dress out of the costume box and putting it on, some of the other boys and girls were laughing at him, but he didn’t mind at all, he very seriously said to them, “Now we are going to play church, I am the priest and you are my audience.”

• This same little boy came to school with a baseball cap on once and was refusing to take it off. I told him that we weren’t allowed to wear hats in school, but he kept begging and begging me to let him leave it on, I asked him why and he told me because he didn’t like his haircut. I assured him it was probably fine and to let me take a look at it, I figured I’d make a big deal of how nice he looked, and that would be the end of it. Well, he took off the cap and he had a big bald spot in the middle of his head! He had tried to cut his own hair the night before. I took him to the principal’s office and we got permission for him to leave his cap on.

• My husband used to play Santa at Christmas for our kids and for our nieces and nephews, one year he asked our nephew Adam if he had been a good boy (poor Adam, trouble just always seemed to follow him, like he had a black cloud over his head, I don’t think he ever left our house without having broken something), Adam didn’t want to lie I guess, so instead he deflected the attention to his sister and said, “Well, sometimes my sister bites my leg.” I thought Santa was going to fall off his chair laughing.

• Anytime my grandson Jayden asks me to do something for him and I agree to it he will say, “Oh, thank you, Umma, you’re the best-est Umma in the world.” And I usually say to him, “Oh, you’re just saying that because I’m you’re only Umma.” One time he asked me to do something, I agreed, and he gave his me his little ‘Best-est Umma’ line, this time I said to him, “Thank you! And you are the best-est Jayden in the world.” And he said, “Oh, you’re just saying that because I’m you’re only Jayden”!


More to follow at another time…