Oprah Trucks & E.T. Cheese

This post is so completely random, but as I was going through some photos from this past month this morning, I found some from a UT football game that we went to with the two older kids.

(If you look real close you can see the extremely cute "pennants" my daughter made for us to use at the game!)

Look at the photo of my son standing next to me. Can you tell how big he is?? For goodness sake the boy is only eight years old and he is nearly my height!! Not that I'm tall, but still -- my eight year old will be looking me straight in the eye in no time and it completely blows my mind sometimes. In just the past year, he has really outgrown his little boy features. Sometimes, it makes me sad. Where does the time go??

It also makes me think about one of my favorite things about my kids as they grow. I absolutely love when they come up with a particular name for something, or when they mispronounce something and then we all end up using the "new" word in our vocabulary.

For a long time we called dinosaurs "see-saurs" because that is what my oldest son Ryan would say when he was little. When my daughter Rachel was little, we called her "Rachie" and she started to call herself "Chi Chi". So of course Chi Chi is what we all started to say ("Cheech" for short) and to this day, "Cheech" is what we call her most of the time. Nicholas calls pots and pans "cook cooks" -- now the rest of us do it as well. It sounds so stupid, but somehow we all pick up on these things and they stick. Some days I think a person might need an interpreter if they were to come to our home and listen to our conversations.

Last week, we turned on Oprah's annual "Favorite Things" show. (Gosh that woman is generous!!) Anyway, she had traveled to Georgia for the show and used Fed Ex to deliver all the presents. My daughter has since been calling every Fed Ex truck we see an "Oprah truck" and I am quite sure we will be calling them this for a while. We also call American cheese slices "E.T. cheese" because when Ryan was little, they had a picture of E.T. on the package one time and he began calling it that. Here we are six years later -- still calling it E.T. cheese.

Other fun words from our personal dictionary -- "basket hounds" instead of bassett, "wobspur" instead of lobster, "arts and craps" instead of arts & crafts, "BombBob" instead of Spongebob -- I am sure there are a million more, but these are the ones that come to mind.

So if you didn't already think I was a bit off my rocker, I'm sure you are now convinced! Ha! I'm hoping some of you will tell me you do the same thing at your house, so I don't feel quite so weird.

Happy Thursday!