Spelling Words

Drilling kids on their spelling words is tedious work, to say the least, so something I like to do is come up with really awful sample sentences. For example, “Breath. I ran out of BREATH cleaning the house all day.” Or, “Steam. Steam will come out of my ears if you keep fighting with your sister.” Most of this week’s words all have the EA combination in them and one of the words is “dead.” So my sample sentence last night was, of course, “One day I will be DEAD.” Both of my kids were sitting at the table and this didn’t get a reaction at all which kind of annoyed me. The next word was “each.” My sentence was “When I am dead, EACH of you will fight over my stuff.” 

This did get a reaction. My first grader set down his pencil, looked me in the eye and said, “When you are dead I am going to take six of your $50 bills and go to the bank and get three one hundred dollar bills.” I wasn’t sure what was more disturbing: his incredible grasp of math at such a young age, or his belief that I will only have $300 to my name when I die. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because then his sister, who is nine, said, “When you die I’m going to take all your jewelry and sell it for money.” Who raised this unsentimental, coldhearted brat?

Time away from them gives me the perspective I need to reflect on our conversations and I realize now that what I should have said was, “Good, because you’re going to need that money for my funeral costs, you little shit.” Instead, I returned to the spelling list and said, “Street. I hope you don't get run over in the street."