Conserving Family Lexicon

Think of all those words our children make up, or how they morph proper words into their own vernacular. Those small utterances are the most precious, silly or insightful things we’ve every heard. We think there is no way we could ever forget them. But, we often do. In the photo to the left, my girls are yelling their childhood words into a basin to catch a few echoes.

With the ease of word processing we can build a living legacy Family Dictionary. Enter these words as we hear them and secure the family lexicon for generations to come. The front pages of a dictionary should help one assemble pronunciation keys and proper layout. Dictionary.com is also a great resource.

Be creative in defining the word. For example if the word is “moomie,” don’t define it as a movie. Write a definition from the child’s perspective like “a motion picture that is usually watched four times a month like the moomie, Babe.” Here are a few examples:

Ab.so.loo.py (āb'soh-lōōp'pē) adv. why yes!
Origin: Little Poe, 1998.
Da.doo (dā'dōō) v. to offer gratitude.
Origin: Little Mommy, 1970.
Grass.pop.per (grās'pop'pər) n. any of numerous herbivorous insects, that jump great distances while simultaneously making a buzzing sound that is frightening but oddly intriguing.
Origin: Little Pie, 2003 while camping in a meadow in the Rockies.
Meesh.mal.low (mēsh'māl'ō) n. a sugar confection, usually soft and spongy, usually roasted on a
stick over the campfire.
Origin: Little Jimmy, 1964.
Pan.a.cake (pān'ə'kāk') n. a small, flat pat of batter, scientifically proven to have more valleys and ridges than Kansas, fried on both sides with Papa’s panacake Pan on Sunday mornings.
Origin: Little Pie, 2003.
Up.stairs Back.wards (ŭp'stârz' bāk'wərdz) adj. downstairs.
Origin: Little Poe, 2000 at Papa’s house in Virginia in the middle of the night.

A living Family Dictionary of Quotations also makes a great legacy too. Follow the format style of other books of quotations; they are usually organized in alpha order by person. I think it best to list the quotations chronologically. A sample may look something like:

Little Pie, 2001-

1. Don’t bother my truth! 2004
2. You are going to hear two different stories. Mine is the truth! 2007, Said to TKH while on a play date.
3. Daddy, are you available for me to jump on your stomach? 2009

Little Po, 1997-

1. The Dolly Mama is a Buddhist Chipmunk who teaches us compassion. 2000
2. Brie cheese tastes like the floor of the hardware store. 2001
3. This store smells like bottoms. 2001, Said while walking through a leather furniture store.
4. We are playing “I Win!” 2001, Said in reference to her Uncle Kiko’s question: What card game are we playing? You keep changing the rules.

Enjoy it! To think you might start something that spans the lives of many generations. I think our children would be proud to see their names in a dictionary or book of quotations. There is no doubt it would make them feel important and loved and give their children a good laugh at what their parents said when they were once small.

My Legacy, A Children’s Library for my children and their children.

“Coriander lifted the gossamer shadow out of the Girl Scout cookie box because the science fair was this Thursday and she’d lost her swimming goggles.”

What did I just read? Aha! I was “sleep reading” aloud to my children at bedtime. Ever done that? It’s like talking in your sleep but you’re not quite asleep. Instead, you’re wringing out what’s left of the day’s wet fabric of consciousness to drop a few more words into a bucket of bedtime stories. This is all fine by morning because you have a strong ally in coffee. You are so on your own at night.

My daughter Poet was begging for the bonus chapter. “Wait and see what happens next” didn’t stand a chance. Her curiosity was bordering on torture. Can Social Services be summoned for failure to read an extra chapter? Can authors be sued for being so talented and suspenseful?

Little Pie, cuddled close to me in slumber on the bottom bunk. I could forfeit that chapter finale, cozy up to Pie, smell her breath, and fall asleep. It was deliciously warm and toasty in her bed. But, I gave my word as an over-achieving reader. Besides, Poet, kept demanding “Read!” from the top bunk.

I’ve been reading chapter books to Poet since she was two. We started with My Father’s Dragon. I went eighty pages first round with Poet hanging on every word. Laryngitis nearly caught up with me. But, my mustang vocal cords eventually broke in and I became the Pony Express of bedtime reading. Poet and I’d gallop into the night, into the wilds of unexplored chapters, and return home half asleep in the saddle. Sometimes we took three-hour rides. Really.

Reading to children is better than therapy. It’s remarkable how deep this simple act fills the most basic of human needs of comfort. If I ever find retirement, be assured I’ll be reading to children.

Reading has taken me all over this world and has several dimensions in time. I was hanging with miners, specifically Baby Doe Tabor, in nineteenth century Colorado when it happened.

A fledgling driver ran a stop sign and struck my Pathfinder en route home from the grocery store. It’s one booger of a story. I figure good things must be born from bad so I started looking for my Phoenix in the mess of that wreckage.

I started thinking about legacy. We all leave one whether we plan on it or not. If you’re naughty, you might leave a legacy of yelling, drinking too much, being unavailable, in denial or never saying two essential words of “I’m sorry.” If you’re nice, you might leave one of Orange Nehi while sitting on a dock fishing on a hot and ridiculously muggy Sunday afternoon or tumbling around on the floor after dinner and playing Jungle and playing the tiger. You can provide safe harbor and live in a house that smells like cake. Realize it or not, you’re leaving one now.

This accident gave me a Mild Traumatic Brain injury, which put me in a state where I couldn’t make sense of things. For the first few months, I couldn’t read. Eventually I learned to live in the moment of a single sentence, forget it, and move on to the next. I started reading to my daughters again. They were enthusiastic memory banks. We’d begin by recapping the previous night’s read.

But, independent reading remained elusive. In search I went to the classics. Huckleberry Finn was confusing; even though I knew the story and loved the vernacular so much I could breathe it. The start and stop chapters of nonfiction worked, but the concentration gave me headaches. That sounds melodramatic. But my injuries mustered headaches from watching snow fall. Over stimulation happened quickly and spiraled into headaches leaving me helpless for hours, sometimes days. It was like long storms of sheet lightening in my brain.

Then one night it happened. I lie in my bed wishing for that extra chapter. So, I snuck in to my daughter’s room and read it while they slept. The next thing I knew I was independently reading the next book in queue. So, I switched gears to the 8-12 year old reading level. Who cares that it was several literary levels below the adolescent who plowed his mother’s car into me. I was reading! Say that just like Forrest Gump said, “I was running!”

Piles of children’s books began to grow in my daughter’s room, my office, and my bedroom. Books were all over the house, which is quite a statement considering that I hate clutter. But, I was building my legacy, a children’s library. I spray mounted paper pockets and date cards bought at an educational supply store. I laminated book jackets to help them endure time; a trick I learned from Poet’s first grade teacher.

At my request, my dad built bookshelves out of old barn wood from my grandfather’s farm. The farm with the fish pond with the dock and frog pond where we picked wild gooseberries, hunted for morels, and rode on the green tractor built the year I was born.

Those bookshelves are now full and once again there are piles of books about the house. Many of the piles are new arrivals to our home. Some are books pulled from the shelves by my daughters and left in the places where they read them. If if we must have clutter, I guess book clutter isn’t so bad.

I hope that someday, a child will pick up a book, look at its date card, see the generations before them, and take a new night’s ride out into an old story. We’ll never know what our legacies will be because we will not be there to define them. But, we can make a choice to start the beginnings of that definition.