11. Out of the Mouths of Babes

Jared: Maybe I don't want to learn to play the piano. You're always complaining that you have to play piano for people.

Jenny: I don't complain about playing the piano. [Aside to Alan] I really need to stop complaining about playing the piano!

Alan: Ha! He got you there. Zing!

Maggie: I hate days we have to wake up early. I wish I could sleep in until I die!

Evy: I can count to a hundred starting at one, and I don't even go one, two, skip a few, 99, 100. I count all the way up.

Several days later, I had a second, unprompted conversation about the same topic:

Evy: I can only count to 111.

Me: Well, what comes after that?

Evy: I don't know. That's as high as I can go.

Me: What comes after normal eleven?

Evy: 12.

Me: Then what comes after one hundred and eleven?

Evy: Ha! 112!

Me: Then what?

Evy: 113! 114! 115!

In yet a third conversation, Evy really upped the ante—by several orders of magnitude—and informed me that she could count to a billion, but she had this important caveat: “Daddy, it would take me two whole days.”

Jenny: I hear some ducks! Do you hear them, Evy?
Evy: That's probably just someone's phone, I think. [We all like to hassle my mom about her ringtone, which sounds like a silly quacking duck.]

Jared has a special knack for corrupting songs by inserting cleverly rhyming potty humor. Over the course of several days of listening in the minivan to the tunes of The Music Man, he invented this one:

"Oh no! The Wells Fart-o wagon is a-bumming down the street. Oh, please let it be for me!"

And this one, which literally made Jenny laugh so hard she cried:

"Poop a little, wipe a little, poop a little, wipe a little. Peep! Peep! Peep! Wipe a lot, poop a little more." Very classy, Jared. I gave Jenny a hard time for laughing and encouraging the bad behavior, and I just rolled my eyes and shook my head—that is, until I started laughing so hard that I cried.

Several weeks after Jenny made fried eggplant, a traditional Southern dish beloved by all, Maggie confessed her worst fears to Evy: (1) spiders, (2) snakes, (3) eggplant, (4) onions. (Jenny has given me permission to openly confess that the eggplant didn't turn out all that great.)

Abby ran into her room, retrieved her purse (which features Big Bird), and informed us of her plans: “I gonna Walmart. I gonna shopping.” A month later, Abby grabbed the same Big Bird purse and enthusiastically declared, “I gonna ballet. I be back soon!”

We gave each of our kids a bowl of steaming-hot homemade applesauce. Upon eating her first bite, Evelyn giggled out loud and said, “It's delicious! The food judges have decided: It's delicious!”

Evy: Jared made me swallow a marble!

Jenny: But he wasn't even in the same room as you.

Evy: But it was his marble! Waaaaaah!

(We asked my brother-in-law Mike for his professional medical advice: “Don't clog the toilet.”)

Evy: We'll never need to move to a different house unless Mommy has another baby. Well, I guess someone could sleep in the kitchen. Or someone could sleep in the living room. People at Grandma and Grandpa Stout's house sleep in the living room all the time.

Abby says keliketon whenever she tries to say skeleton.

Speaking of skeletons, Jenny asked Abby what Jack Skellington says. Abby thought for a moment and then sang, in tune, a line from The Nightmare Before Christmas: “Oh somewhere deep inside of these bones.”

Maggie: Without cows, we wouldn't have milk. Without milk, we wouldn't have cheese. And without cheese, we wouldn't have fondue.

Evy: Cows make lots of things, so I'm glad we have cows.

After this most recent General Conference, Jared blamed his cough and headache on watching too much TV. Um, maybe it was all of the treats that we use to bribe—I mean to encourage—our kids to listen to Conference.

A short conversation before our drive to Disneyland:

Jenny: When I was young, we never took an airplane to Disneyland. We always drove. And that was before people had DVD players in their cars.

Jared: Boy, that must have been awful. Had books been invented yet?

Abigail likes to watch Monsters Inc, and thinks Mike Wazowski is a frog. In fairness, he does have a rather amphibian appearance.

While on our recent family vacation, we fell victim to one of the classic blunders: We introduced our kids to the deliciousness of Disneyland cuisine. The kids’ meals included carrot sticks, and Jenny told them, in no uncertain terms, that they had better eat them because, she explained, “They're the most expensive carrots you'll eat your entire life!”

Evy: Daddy, I don't really want my carrots, so you can have them. [Smiling knowingly] They're really good: They taste expensive!

Also at Disneyland:
Alan: Jared, I hereby designate you as the official rememberer for your fanny pack.

Jared: I hereby abdicate my responsibility to Maggie.

Our family sings a ridiculous song anytime we drive through Beaver en route to Southern Utah. Maggie invented a verse of her own:

Beaver zero beaver one, let's all smell the beaver bum.

Jenny: Abby, what does a lion say?

Abby: Roar!

Jenny: What does a tiger say?

Abby: Grrr!

Jenny: What does a leopard say?

Abby: Meow!
Jenny: What does Abby say?
Abby: I'm cute!

Maggie: I bet Quick Quack Car Wash cleans your car with duck spittle. [Who even uses the word spittle? Gross.]

Jenny: Time for me and Daddy to collect Halloween-candy taxes!

Evy: Nope, we're not paying you taxes.

Evy: I bet Olive Garden is one of the most famous restaurants in the whole world because they sell food!

Jared: An excellent quality for any restaurant to have.

Jared: I don't get why vegans can't eat milk and cheese. I can get behind not eating animals, but milk? Do they think it contains the cow’s life force?

Evy: [During a conversation about not doing drugs] People who only think about soda are drunk.

Jared: Do you think there are pandas in heaven? [Jared has recently developed a weird obsession with pandas—and panda stuffed animals.]

Jared: [While praying for my three pregnant sisters] Please bless the aunts in our tummies. I mean please bless our aunts and the babies in their tummies.

Maggie: I wish there was something called a cheeseburger plant. You could plant a seed and then after an hour or two there would be like ten cheeseburgers on it.

Abby loves celebrating the holidays and setting up the "Chrimpas" tree and the "Chrimpas lights" and reading about the "Granch."

When Abby has two identical toys, etc., she explains that she has "Two of 'ems."

We recently had a conversation about ultrasounds:

Jared: I thought it was called an autopsy.

Maggie: Can't they just check to see whether the baby has short hair or long hair?

Abby loves reading stories about Winnie the Pooh and "Pliggett."

Evy: Even though it's cold outside, I don't feel cold. I think I'm a reptile. [That's a logical leap that sort of threw me.]

Abby: I like the bishop. The bishop gives candy. The bishop is the best.

Evy: When you kick somebody's butt, it's called kicking butt.

Evy: Daddy, I know what I'm going to get you for Christmas. I'm going to get a plastic bag and blow kisses into it and give it to you.

Jared: This soup tastes like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Alan: Wait, what?

Jared: Yeah, it tastes like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Alan: So to be clear, the soup tastes like a movie. Do I understand that correctly?

Jared: Yes, it makes me feel the way I do whenever I watch it.

Alan: Got it.

Maggie: In England, there are three different kinds of “hot”: “hot,” “hat,” and “heart.” I wouldn't want to be British because then people wouldn't know which one I was talking about.

Abby loves going to the aquarium to see the "coonins," which is how she says penguins. Actually, she calls them penguins now, but she and I like to correct each other. "They're coonins! No, they're penguins! No, they're coonins!"

Alan: I just love my kids so much!

Maggie: You just love your kids? Welcome to the dad who doesn't love his wife.

We were talking about mini cars, but Abby kept calling them minion cars. She's been loving the Despicable Me movies

Evy explained to me that the sun goes down later due to "Daylight Sabre."

Abby has recently been on a kick where she asks us to sing "I'm So Glad When Daddy Comes Home" as one of her bedtime songs. She's been branching out lately, and now I get to roll my eyes as I sing "I'm so glad when Elsa [or Anna] comes home! Glad as I can be!"

Maggie and Evy adopted a Box Elder bug that was flying around our kitchen. They named him Buggy, and Evy made him a homemade pillow. Jenny explained that insects don't make the best pets, so the girls—with great reluctance—released Buggy into his natural habitat. An hour later, Evy drew a picture of Buggy and silently cried as she reflected on fond memories of her special pet. (I might mention that this is the first pet the girls have owned since the Henry incident.)