Hooked on Laundry Worked for Me

My mother-in-law often tells the story of how the hubby could read when he was two. Apparently, while reading the paper, the hubby read the word "Sears" off an advertisement. Like most moms who brag about their brood, she gets teased about this story a bit.

I have no doubt that the hubby was probably an early reader and that he was super curious, super smart little boy (after all, that's the man he became). And I definitely don't doubt that he recognized the word. My theory, though, is that Sears would be a really tough word to truly read. I mean the "ea" - if you're sounding that out - would a two year old be able to figure that out? I don't know, but I believe that my mother-in-law believes that he read it, so who am I to argue?

Especially after yesterday.

After a morning out (Happy Birthday again D!), we stopped by the grocery store to pick up milk and a few other essentials we wouldn't be able to survive the afternoon without. It was raining and the idea of strapping peanut into and pushing a huge cart around for just a few items wasn't worth it to me, so I let him walk the aisles with me. He was actually very well behaved and only stopped to look at a few things and everything stayed on the shelves.

We were taking a short cut through the detergent aisle when peanut stopped at the end cap display, pointed at a bottle and said what sounded like "Tide." I peaked around and sure enough, it was a bottle of Tide. WHAT?! We buy Tide, but I always just call it soap around the peanut when we're doing laundry.

I took his hand and we found the shelves of Tide products. I pointed again, "Peanut, what does this say?"

"Tide."

WHAT?! So I did what any good parent does...I called the hubby on the way home and said "Holy cow, the kid can read."

Okay, so I don't really think he can read. I imagine he saw something on the bottle and whatever he was trying to say just came out sounding similar (after all, his word for outside sounds a lot like tide). A pure coincidence probably. Peanut knows his letters (well, all of them except for L, K and G), but putting them together? I'm not convinced.

To really kill my thrill, when the hubby came home, we took out our own bottle of Tide, showed it to peanut and asked him what it said. His response: "Soap."

Oh well. Either this is an example of severe over-excited-mama-bragging-itis or an indication that I spend entirely too much time doing laundry.