Kids Spell The Darnest Things

My youngest, who’s 10, apparently going on 30, had to choose his own spelling words for school this week. Normally, a weekly list is sent home and he has a spelling test each Friday. To help him understand and spell the words correctly, he sometimes has to use each word in a sentence or use the words in a paragraph. He’s a good speller and takes after his Mom in that department. I’m an atrois, autrouis, athrowus - really bad speller. How bad? I once misspelled physics in front of 150 people. That kind of bad. It’s embarrassing really. (I just misspelled embarrassing. Thank you spell check.)

Anyway, he picked up my World Book Dictionary (both volumes) and sat down at the kitchen table to pick out his words. First word – nipple. I kid you not. He didn’t know what it meant. (or so he says….) My wife and I cracked up. He was less than amused that we were laughing. I had no idea how he was going to use that word in a sentence. His next word – shaft. Seriously. Imagine our surprise when his third word was firm. We lost it. My wife said it must be true that leaf doesn’t fall far from the tree in an admittedly good dig at me. My oldest, who has a sharp tongue (no idea where he gets that from), said to him, why don’t you just pick penis and get it over with. By this time we were howling. The youngest was less than amused and threw his paper on the floor in disgust and left the kitchen in a huff - arms crossed and all.

After we stopped laughing, he came back and picked another word. He chose the mundane, although difficult to spell, amphitheatre. I’m not sure what words made the final cut but who knew spelling could be such fun.