Rutabagas and Turnips (this is the punchline).

Rutabagas or "begies" as Grandma Mim calls them are one of the most ridiculous sounding vegetables in existence.  Turnips aren't any more sophisticated.

Sometimes I forget that the great thing about having children is having fun with them. I wrote a parenting curriculum for a company that wanted to teach Peace to young children and their parents.  The CEO of the company reminded me that when I wrote the curriculum, I needed to remember to encourage parents to have fun with their children.  

I was an amazing after-school director, the children thought I was so fun and funny and I brought a breath of fresh air to their troubled East Harlem lives.

As a parent, I had put such pressure on myself to raise a well-behaved child, that I had forgotten that a sense of humor is one of the most valuable qualities of a self-composed person.

By the time Edie was about 9 months old, "fun" was not in my vocabulary.  I had endured 4 months of colic, 9 months of sleep training a very determined  baby with  a babysitter who undermined every step of our progress, and teething that brought about hours of inconsolable crying.  

I had lost the thread until my friend Sparka came to visit us around this time and she got such joy out of little Edie, that she reminded me of this sage advice.  Children are fun and you should enjoy them, because the times that are fun will be very short.  

I was raised in a household of funny people, and although I think of myself as humorous, I am often so uptight, that there is nothing funny about me.  I have been described as intense, dry, serious, focused, but not usually as "fun".  

Every time I try to tell a joke, my audience is left scratching their heads while I chuckle to myself.  

Recently, my husband has been trying to help me with the set-up.  The beauty of children is that they don't generally require the set-up.  I think that is always why I made such a charming caregiver.  Children always found my crazy punchlines to be so crazy that it made them laugh. 

We had such a difficult couple of tense days, the children and I, that it was a joy to finally sit down and read Happy Baby Words together.  This is one of those object identification DK books that my daughter is past, so in order to make it fun to read, we just replace random words with either Rutabaga or Turnip.  Then we laugh ourselves into hilarity. 

There, I did it, I started out with the punchline and you had no idea where this post was going, but in the end, seeing a little girl in a book playing with rutabagas instead of blocks or a child 'turninping' instead of crawling, can lighten the night of tension between a three year old and her mom.  Who cares about the set-up.