House Full of Geniuses

One of my least favorite tasks of motherhood (not as bad as pushing swings, but close) is spelling. At least once a day, one or more of the kiddies yells to me "How do you spell Thursday?" or whatever day it is, or whatever they are looking at, or whatever word they think they've heard before but can't pronounce. It is crucial that they position themselves just right, so they can hear me but not be sure if they have heard me correctly. Then we can have this witty repartee:

Kiddie: How do you spell telephone?

Mommy: T

Kiddie: D or T?

Mommy: T

Mommy: T did you hear me?

Kiddie (in a borderline hostile fashion): I GOT T!! What's next?

Mommy: E

Kiddie: D???

Eventually I order them to bring their paper and pencil to me so that they can hear what I'm saying. At this point, rather than get up, they stop looking for perfection and just write down what they think I'm saying.

Last Christmas I got both girls dictionaries, hoping that soon I'd be able to tell them to look up the words they couldn't spell, and we could have this conversation:

Kiddie: How do you spell telephone?

Mommy: Look it up in your dictionary.

Kiddie: Did you say pick up a fairy?

Mommy: NO

Kiddie: O?

Sometimes however, the spelling is cute. When Lauren was three, she heard Aislinn asking me to spell things, so she would ask for spellings too, even though she couldn't write many (if any) letters. We'd have this conversation:

Lauren: Mommy, how do you spell pretty?

Mommy: P

Lauren: Got it.

The "Got it" always cracked me up, because even if she didn't know how to write, she knew that was what to say after each letter. Whenever she chose a word like "mommy" she would sigh with exasperation "I already HAVE AN M."

Now Lauren is 5, cruising through kindergarten, and while very testy when asked to write lower case letters, she can write pretty well:

"GOOD MORNING TODAY IS THURSDAY WE GO TO LIBRARY TODAY IS FOGGY AND COLD"

And now Marty has gotten in on the spelling game. Perhaps because he is still napping and has a little more energy than the sisters, rather than yelling from the other room, he runs back to me from the easel before asking for letters. But whenever he gets back to the easel, he calls out "Got it!"

(telephone, high chair, mommy (sigh, "I already HAVE AN M!"),pancake)

Apropos of nothing: Not that anyone will be able to feel my pain (other than perhaps my sister Erin who is surrounded by antiquated children's books) while I was spelling these words for him I was reading "Unicorn Magic" to the girls. A horrifying library book that is not only stupid and horribly illustrated, but also really, really, really, long.