What rhymes with...

I’m looking forward to being past the rhyming stage. It comes hand-in-hand with the knock-knock joke telling stage, and is equally as headache inducing.

We had an…issue…a few years back when my first two children entered this stage. They were sitting at the breakfast table playing the rhyming game. It started innocently enough: cat, bat, rat, mat, fat, hat. They find it hilariously funny to throw in some nonsensical words that mean nothing at all: lat, wat, zat, gat. The problem is that their little vocabularies are very limited at that age, and what they think is a goofy-sounding combination that isn’t a real word, sometimes…is. One of them threw out the word “itchy” to rhyme next. Well, you can only pursue that line of rhyming for so long before a seeing a look of horror pass over your mother’s face.

If they would have just…moved on…from the naughty no-no word, all would have been well, and Mom would have just ignored the whole thing. It never goes that easy in my family. They found that particular combination of sounds to be tickle-me-pink hilarious, and decided to camp there for a while. Their two little sisters were listening in rapt attention, and I really did need to intervene. I told them they could not say that word. I wanted to leave it at that. The whole childhood-innocence thing and all. But anyone who knows my kids, knows that they are masters at the art of question-asking. The barrage began…

“But why can’t we say that word?”
“What does it mean?”
“Can we say it just to each other in our bedrooms?”
“Can we say it if we only whisper it?”
“Can we say it only on leap-day while wearing pink and orange polka-dotted pajamas, standing on our heads, and yodeling in the middle of a ring of fire???”

To which I craft stunningly brilliant replies like…

“Because I said so”
“I’m not telling”
“No”
“Double-no”
and
“Sure, go for it.”

*Insta-headache*

Of course, they never forgot that day. Two years later, they still talk about it as if it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to them. “Remember when we rhymed ‘itchy’ and Mom’s eyes popped out of her head? Hardee-har-har!”

Now, my third child has entered the rhyming stage. It’s worse this time around. This time, the older two children are street-smart enough to know when they hear a bad word. As child number three happily rhymes along, creating real, nonsensical, and just plain obscene words, all in the same sentence, her two older siblings feel the burning need to jump all over her unintentional potty-mouth.

“You can’t say that!!! Mom, [Gertrude] just said a naughty word again!!!”

“Yes, I know. And if you two turkeys would just ignore it, she’d never even know the difference! Now hush!”

You know you’ve reached a point of desperation when you start responding to this situation by saying, “Hey [Gertrude], knock-knock…”