NFTV: The Milk Story

I have a secret name for our family. I think we are a sitcom. I calls us “Nerd Family on TV.” We’re the kind of people that other people call “characters.” So it fits. Sometimes I swear I hear canned laughter coming from the closets. I need to document some of this soon. If I don’t let people know what we do, in a couple of years they’ll be calling it Alzheimer’s and trying to take us away. Quite frankly I’d go for that but we have a kid in college. We can’t afford it.

The pilot episode of Nerd Family on TV has to be what I call “The Milk Story.”

The precocious one was six months past turning three, well into reading and driving us crazy by spelling instead of talking. He’d been doing this since he was two, so our spelling skills had quite improved. We figured we didn’t need to practice much longer, but he saw things differently.

“S-T-O-P What’s that spell?” he would say, while I was driving.

“You already know.”

“What’s that spell?”

“You already know.”

“What’s that spell?”

“STOP ALREADY!”

“How do you spell already?”

I’d come home to find LIQUOR and PRESCRIPTIONS written in magnetic letters again and know that they’d been to the store.

Lately my child had learned to outsmart me. That day I drove straight from home through a forest preserve, purposefully taking a route without signs for him to see. He was blissfully quite for almost ten minutes. Then he threw a new one at me.

“E-E-F-F-O-C. What’s that spell, Mom?” If only you heard how sweetly he asked.

Slightly surprised, I said, “Honey, I’m afraid, it doesn’t spell anything.”

“It’s coffee backwards,” he said unemotionally.

Where did that come from? Remember he was only six months past three.

Later that night or some night about then, his father the one who was about . . . forty-three sat us down to a dinner he had invested a great deal of himself in preparing. It was a spectacular chicken Napaleon feast. It took hours of preparation, and there was much fanfare to it. His anticipation made me a little uneasy. After all, it is Nerd Family on TV.

One thing about three-year-olds is that today they’ll eat any thing. Tomorrow you can offer the very same thing, and they won’t go anywhere near it. Our son had a signal for when he was in the latter mood. He would fill up on milk and ignore his food. That’s exactly what he did to his dad’s highly-prepared meal. The young man of three, drank his milk. Looked at his plate. Looked at his father and with angelic politeness said,

“May I have more milk, please?”

“I think you need to eat first,” his father replied.

Our son politely shifted his position, turning his back to his father his face to me, ignoring his food and his father too. He said, “Mom how do you spell refrigerator? . . . chandelier? . . . calculator? . . . spoon?

I had no problem with the child not eating. Having grown up around kids and babysitting, I knew that there would be no starvation or malnutrition.

My husband is an only child. He was the chef. He is a man. This was not about finishing dinner. This was two boys in a power struggle. With each word that my son asked me to spell, his father’s face got redder, and redder, and redder, until my husband leaned forward and looked our child in the eye.

“Son,” he said slow and controlled, “How do you spell EAT?”

Keeping eye contact, our son’s sweet voice said, “M--I--L--K.”

I had to go into the hall, to laugh where they couldn’t see me.

Then I had an overwhelming thought.

If this is three, what is sixteen?

—me strauss Letting me be