Week 304: hairs and hares

Man, what is it with Mandy and her hair? Not only did she hack a good chunk of it off that one time, but any time you try to do so much as comb it lately she completely freaks out. If I suddenly hear shrieks of absolute horror and rage coming from her bathroom, I can usually be pretty sure that either the hyenas have breached our defenses again, or Geralyn is trying to put Mandy’s hair up in a simple pony tail. Usually it’s the latter.

Sam’s new thing lately is learning to spell words by repeatedly sounding them out. Only she sometimes gets stuck on the first sound in the word, which can be annoying if you’re trying to have a normal conversation and end up feeling like you’re talking to Porky Pig on a bad day.

I recently also blew Sam’s mind by introducing her to the concept of homonyms. The realization that “light” (as in from a lamp) and “light” (as in not weighing much) are said and spelled the same way, yet meant completely different things literally shorted out her brain for a few seconds as it tried to make the least bit of sense out of this. Then I drove it home by telling her about homophones, like “know” and “no” or “tale” and “tail” or –OH MY GOD!– “to,” “too,” and “two.” I decided to pull back and not bring up heteronyms, though.

The funny thing about this is that it reminded me of how god-like adults sometimes appear to children in their wisdom and power. Sam was just starting to get her brain around the ways that letters fit together to make words, much less the idea that “row” is always spelled the same, but can refer to either an argument or something you do with boat depending on how it’s pronounced. Now her favorite thing is to have me toss out more and more of these linguistic oddities like some kind of language magician, and honestly I’m starting to run out.

Ooh, wait, I just thought of another one: bass (fish) and bass (instrument). Good one. Oh! And I can throw in “base” to really mess with her. Heh heh heh…

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