April Tuesday

 

Today is April Fools Day. It brings to mind a story that always makes me smile. When Lauren was in first grade her class worked on creating calendars. She painstakingly entered family birthdays, holidays and special events that were important to her. She proudly showed us all of her work and we looked through the decorated months. April proved to be the most interesting. On April 2nd of course, she noted my birthday, but on April 1st, (which fell on a Thursday that year) she had carefully written in April Tuesday. Huh? “Lauren, this is a beautiful calendar, what is April Tuesday?” “ You know, April Tuesday, when we play tricks.” Oh! April Fools day! All this time, she had heard April Tuesday!  “April Tuesday” what a clever brain you have, I can understand how April Fools Day sounds like April Tuesday! And sometimes it is on a Tuesday!" For the record, in my family, April first has been April Tuesday ever since.  Another classic from Lauren came to our attention when we were on a family car trip. We were doing some singing when we realized that the lyrics to the classic song Puff the magic Dragon had gone through some changes. ‘Noble kings and princes would bow whene'er they came’ had become “ noble dooble princes would bow wherever he came” In the very next verse, ‘A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys’ was turned into ‘ a dragon lives in butter’ It was hard not to chuckle. Lots of families have stories of things that their kids hear and pronounce in novel ways. Here is the tricky part. Parents need to tread carefully. There is a big difference between laughing ‘at’ someone and laughing ‘with’ someone. Some kids love telling jokes, putting on a show and eliciting a giggle from their audience. Other kids are more sensitive and could get their feelings hurt if you end up laughing at the odd things they come up with. Know your kid, If they are able to have a good time with it, have a good laugh together. If not, write it down. Someday I assure you that they will love looking back at some of their own personal Mondegreens. If you haven’t heard that term before, a Mondegreen is a term that writer Sylvia Wright came up with in a 1954 essay in which she tells about how she misunderstood a line from The Bonnie Earl O’Murray. The correct line was “laid him on the green’ She heard this as ‘Lady Mondegreen’. This one little error became the term for these butchered lyrics. If you google it, there are quite a few lists of common misunderstood words to songs. If you are in need of a laugh, some are quite amusing. (My all time favorite is from the Beatles Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Instead of the real words, “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”, people have heard “The girl with colitis goes by.”) Before I end this post, I want to make one more note about April Fools Day. I would love it if parents had a conversation with their kids about tricks in general. In an effort to teach our kids to be kind, there is a simple question - will a certain trick make someone laugh or cry? If the answer is not clear, maybe that trick is not such a good idea.