The challenge in this Funny Thing of Today project, I have found, is not locating the funny thing. Between founding a college with 120 teenagers at work and overseeing a family with six kiddos back home, I’m awash in funny things. The trick is locating a funny thing that still comes across as funny in writing. If it’s a “You kinda had to be there” moment, then it does nothing for this blogger.
So at dinner tonight, Tina the three-year-old announced that she did not like her dinner. “It’s icky!” she shouted. “Your pasta is not icky,” her mother replied serenely, but Tina repeated: “My pasta is icky!”
“Have some beans.”
“My beans are icky!”
Whereupon Tina flung her head back as far as it would go and pooched out her lips in that ultra-pouty expression that–well, are you a parent? Then you’ve seen the expression I mean. “Poochy lips!” went up the cry from kids around the table, “Tina’s doing the poochy lips!”
And in a moment of inspiration, I added to the chorus: “Icky poochy lips!”
Then commenced a great battle on Tina’s face. The whole notion, the sound, the texture of the very words “icky poochy lips” filled her three-year-old soul with giggles, but her stubborn three-year-old irascibility wanted to maintain the poochy lips, icky or no. Her lips, stuck out as far as her little facial muscles could extend them, writhed and wriggled between pooch and grin. Then all collapsed, and a smile broke over her face like sunrise over the prairie.
“No,” she said, laughing, “not icky!”
And I laughed the rest of the evening. It was–well, it was–well, I guess you just had to be there.
