Our family intentionally sings, "Sandwiches, sandwiches" to that Pocahontas song! LOL

Another line from the song goes, "barely even human". But my dd, 3.75 yo, thinks it's, "walla walla human".

Spaghetti: "Pah-getti" :)

Thanks for the laugh.

I'll have to write some more down as I remember them, but the one that automatically pops into my head is something my oldest daughter (who's now 19!) said when she was about 2. It's not a song, but a phrase from an old radio commercial. BP gas stations used the phrase back then, "BP, on the move". But every time she heard that Sarah would shout, "Pee pee on the moon!" with glee.

Sally in No. VA
mom of 5 ages 19, 9, 7, 4 and 20 months.

My 3yo sang instead of:

"Baa, Baa, Black sheep"

"Barbie, black sheep"

and instead of:

"Mirror, Mirror, on the wall"

"Mirror, Mirror, at the mall"

Sam in Sydney, Australia

My daughter came up with this one that had everyone rolling on the floor...

The gospel song - "He's got the whole world in his hands" got translated by my 3 year old to "he's got the whole world in his pants".

Dawn

When my son Jason (now 25) was little, he loved learning about science - and still does. When he was 3, he rubbed a balloon against his hair, stuck it to the wall, and said, "Look, Mommy! Ecstatic electricity!"

Jan Hunt
The Natural Child Project

My kids, 5 and 2, like to watch a movie about motorcycles, and in the movie the announcer says, "Motocross riders take it to the limit." But my kids have decided that the saying is really "Take it to the lemon," and they say it all the time. "I'm going to go swing, and I'm really going to take it to the lemon!"

Aaron just says "pasteye".

Traci, mom to Aaron 11/20/2004. Oklahoma, U.S.

Mary Had a little lamb:
"...made the children laugh and play which was against the rule"

From the Sound of Music:
"When the Dog bites when the Bee stings,
these are a few of my favorite things!"

Perhaps we should sign up for some coaching in joy eh?

For us it wasn't spaghetti it was Racanoni (macaroni)

My daughter pronounces "spaghetti" as "spaghetti" but she does come up with some cute lyrics to well-known songs. Here's our favorite, from "We Wish You a Merry Christmas:"

"...good tidings we bring to you and your kid..." :)

My sister-in-law used to ask for the "Heater Song." You know, the one that says "...and we'll all go out to heat her when she comes ('round the mountain)"

Karen

My daughter's favorite place to eat is the Old Scabetee Facatee! Yum!

My now 12 year old used to sing instead of "In the Navy" (Village People)..."I'm a Lady"! Yes she was!

Danette

instead of:

"ring around the rosie-
a pocket full of posies...

my daughter would sing:

ring around the rosie-
talk about the rosies...

Anika used to ask to go swimming by saying she wanted "baby soup" which was her way of saying bathing suit.

Krisula

My daughter, now 20, used to sing, "The bird was on the angel!" (...and BINGO was his name-o)

It still makes me smile to think about her sitting on the bed singing that! :-)

Our dd, just turned four, likes to recite the following:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
how does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells,
and pretty maids all tied up in a row.

I think Mary must have been feeling Very Contrary the day she planted that garden!

Miriam

I went to a wedding recently and actually took the time to apply nail polish (a rare event indeed!).

The 2yr old love of my life was facinated by it, and constantly wanted to look at my 'eye polish'.

While my son comes up with some of the best words and phrases I've ever heard, I will report how my niece says breakfast...brefixt. She still says it 'though she's now 16. She just can't get her tongue around it.

Ds2 at around 2.5 yrs used to say such cute things - along them:

* Pelly Bot (which was for pot belly - a small wood burning stove)

* Tail Noes (for toe nails)

Gorgeous wee muffin that he was/is!!

Hilary in NZ / ds 13yrs, ds 5yrs, dd 16 months

What's funny to me is how sometimes the re-invented word seems much more difficult to pronounce than the original version. Take for instance my oldest son's transformation of "transformers" some 21 years ago. He would say "fra MOR for size." The recent movie (haven't seen it) has inundated us with memories each time we see a trailer for it as it was his favorite tv show way back in the day.

DS3 referred to both crackers and tractors as "practors" so you had to consider the surroundings to know which he was talking about at the time; were we in the kitchen, was he hungry or were we on the road passing a farm? He also called his brother Richard "Yi yer." Got a kick out of that.

My favorite though, has to be my twins names for each other. They only used the last syllable of the other's name. Mary called Walter "Ta" and Walter called Mary "Re." I understand that it makes sense that the last syllable one hears makes a lasting impression, but I always wondered how, at the tender age of a year, they both came up with this. Must be that "twin" thing you hear about. It was a bittersweet day when they stopped using their shortened names and began using their full names, joy for their growing maturity and sadness for their babyhood slipping away.

How I love being a mom,
Mom to ds 24, ds 22, ds 19, dd 16, ds 16

Our family favorite mispronunciations

bitty-say-der = babysitter

fal-a-corn-ya = california

My niece just sent me this - she lives in southern California, close to the recent fires there:

"Samantha, age 6, told me she heard that, because of the fires, a lot of people were told they had to evaporate."

Jan Hunt, Director
The Natural Child Project

My son Kalob, who is 7 1/2 now, used to call Home Depot, Home Po-Po. We also saw Patakillers (caterpillars which now I'm unsure if I'm spelling correctly...lol)and flutterflies (butterflies).

My daughter Kelsi, now 4 1/2, when learning to first speak, always referred to dad as "Hi". It took a while for us to catch on as we thought she was SAYING hi TO him, but then realized she was never saying daddy. It was quite the laugh for some time.

With love,
Tammy

My children really prefer singing songs they write themselves, but I do enjoy their new word inventions such as when DS8 was 4, he referred to the doors that open automatically at the grocery store as opening *automagically.* For me, even more descriptive than the real word. Electricity still seems kind of magical to me. LOL.

Last year DS4, loved lime popsicles and called them pacoos (for popsicle) and now anything lime green in color is pacoo and we know exactly what shade of green we're talking about!

My 3-yr-old daughter's version of the alphabet song in English (not her first language) includes this version of the familiar conglomerate l-m-n-o-p: "mello mello p." And we hear it as "mellow" of course!

LisaR in northern California

Most of the people where we live have either black or dark brown hair and when my son wassix I told him that brown hair was brunette and that yellow hair was blonde, up until then the one or two that we had seen he called yellow haired. My son and I were riding in the back seat and he was in the middle and me on the passenger side and a friend on the driver side. The friend we had recently met and he was looking up at her and turned to me and said " mom. Eilee is half blind". I laughed then and I am laughing now as I read what I typed. She was not a blonde and her hair underneath he could see and she had colored her hair to be blonde a while back and he forgot the word blonde as we had just been learning it and resorted to the word blind as he was more familiar with it. I apologized to our friend if her feelings were hurt and she said it was okay and yet she did not laugh as hard as my husband and I did then and many times since.I love my son. He is so cute and funny.

When my stepsister was about four, she sang a verse of Jingle Bells as "when bells on toptails ring" instead of "when bells on bobtails ring."

We're both in our 40's now but I still can't sing it right!

Chris
in Fulton, MD

When my son was just learning how to talk, he used to call me "Money" instead of mommy. My husband thought that was *great*. Look - there's money. lol.

Dd who is just 2 sings "Baa Baa Backshee, Get Da Ball"
We love it! We imagine it being sung by massive soccer crowds in the UK one day.

Hilary in NZ / ds 14yrs, ds 5.5yrs, dd 2yrs

This is from a friend - but its so funny, I had to include it here:
"We went along this afternoon to a Chanting Workshop with the Tibetan Monks (2.5yr old ds did his own particular ‘brand’ of ‘chanting’ (ie yelling) the whole time which was rather stressful for me really!…) It was a last minute decision… a friend called 5 minutes before and said it would be easy with the kids there blah, blah...and the monks do LOVE kids etc, but it was just the format, it was boring for ds. And also (have to laugh A LOT) I’d asked the kids when my friend called if they wanted to go to see some monks singing/chanting. And they say yes, and were all excited! And we got there and ds kept saying "where are the monks, where are the monks!", and I kept pointing to them etc. Anyway, I suddenly had a flash and said ‘did you think I meant monkeys?’ and he said "Yeah"… Poor thing! – he was in a bad mood from then on – he’d thought we were going to see singing monkeys! I had to laugh! He felt pretty ripped off…especially since we’d been building it up in the car on the way there, and he was so excited. Oh the joys of motherhood…

On the new B52s song, it says,
Hippie be quiet, your peace sign t-shirt could cause a riot.

My daughter says,
Hippie be quiet, your pizza t-shirt could cause a riot.

She said to me, "What's a pizza t-shirt?"

One of my littleone's first words was sister. But her version was ditdirt. We considered making a T-shirt with ditdirt = sister on it.... :)

S's were only a temporary challenge.

Tiffiny in Mesa, AZ
Two girls 10 and 2

Hi all,

We're dutch speaking but I think my son's (ds#2, 2,5 yo) reconstructions of words are still funny when translated. Lately he's experimenting with pronouncing longer words, but they come out in a twist sometimes. Our favourite is when he wants to go on an errandrun for berrystraws! They're his current favourite fruit. Another one that he doesn't seem to get 'right' is Santa Claus. In the dutch version this man comes from Spain to visit Holland around december 5th, but littlee is still now wildly impressed by him. He twists the dutch translation such that it turns out to sound like Santa Sod. Oopsee...

Several years ago my (then) two year old was "reading" his new baby sister one of his books... The Vewy Hungwy Potapoter is still one of this family's favorites!

julie
DS 2/02, DD 5/04, DD 3/07 (our *bonus* baby!)

My dd1, who is almost 6, calls the fairy G'd mother from Cinderella the G'd-fairy-mother :). This always brings a smile to my face.

Dd1 will often request a sangwich and my ds, who is almost 4, likes to be maked (naked) and eat mistake (steak). And if I were a hollopuss (octopus, again ds) I'd comply with all requests simultaneously.

Ima062002, mom to 3 kids, LC in training

Some of my favorites of my older ds (who is almost five) are:

--I need a fork and poon.
--I want to do this just a yibba bit more.
--Waboon for balloon.
--Exclaiming when he saw the cherry trees in blossom, "mama, mama, it's PING!"
--and the latest, "Mama, I love you as big as Godzilla!"

My youngest is just on the cusp of talking so we're in for a whole new set!

Stacy in Seattle
together with sweet hubby and two sons (4 1/2 and 1 1/2 yrs old)
http://mama-om.blogspot.com

The funniest thing lately was when our 8 year old and I had read a great book on Abraham Lincoln. While visiting at the beach with my mother, our son was telling her about Abraham, and what a great man he was. He told her how he was so happy that Abraham enacted the "Constipation Proclamation", and how that would forever make a difference in the world!!

And in my anal-fixated family---this was hysterical! The Uncles particularly liked it.

Another was when my 5 yr old son was telling his dad after our visit to the aquarium about the octopus: "It has 8 testicles Daddy! Isn't that amazing???" "Indeed!"

http://sandandstardust.blogspot.com