Sometimes I think I had children just so I could laugh more.  All of my life I’d heard about the joy children bring to a home, but I don’t know that the high level of humor that exists in my household is exactly what they had in mind.

 

Kids are an endless supply of chuckles and grins for me.  Not just my own two children, but all kids in general.  As a music instructor I’ve been fortunate enough to interact with a lot of young people and every single day one or more of them make me laugh out loud and heartily and, as a result, have allowed me to take the world at large less seriously.  I think I will always be grateful to them for that.

 

One subject that comes up a lot around kids is the Tooth Fairy, because children typically lose their entire mouthful of teeth between the ages of 6 and 12 – the age of most of my music students.  After 15 years of a couple dozen students a week, I have heard my fair share of Tooth Fairy stories.  The best stories are ones about why the Tooth Fairy didn’t show up (which I confess has happened a lot in our house, that silly old overwhelmed, absent-minded Dental Dimwit).  Honestly, if I were the Tooth Fairy’s employer, I might have fired her years ago … what with all of the lame excuses she’s used for not showing up.  Some of my personal all-time favorites:

 

• Terrible Weather conditions.   Apparently wings don’t work well in rain/wind/snow/humidity/dry heat.
• She was afraid of the new puppy/cat/hamster/daddy’s new haircut.
• Tooth Fairy holiday.  Just like the trash collectors, she adds a day to her normal schedule and will show up the following night after the tooth extraction.
• ATM malfunction in Fairyland.  She couldn’t get cash in time.
• Fairy Traffic Control Tower on the fritz.
• Change of address card didn’t reach her in time.
• She slept in because the Tooth Fairy convention ran late.

Feel free to use any of the above that appeal to you, there’s no copyright as of yet.

 

Another thing that tickles my funny bone is that early on, kids develop great crap detectors and they’re not afraid to use them.  They know that melted cheese does not, and maybe never will, make brussel sprouts or broccoli taste better and yes, mom … those pants do kinda make you look fat.

 

I also truly appreciate the humor behind how kids can break things down to the nitty-gritty bottom line.  When my son was young, he had very limited language skills due to his autism.  Now, where some people have perceived my son’s disability as a great tragedy, I’ve spent enough years in the trenches with my boy to see the wonderful gifts attached to it.  Because of his autism, my son sees the world in black and white and if you spend some time with him, you’ll see what a hoot that can really be.

 

Once in a public bathroom there was a huge industrial-sized toilet paper dispenser that had the manufacturers’ name in embossed letters. 

Jordan

ran his five-year-old little finger across each bumpy one saying, “S – C – O – T – T … wipe your shmeckle!”  [For the uninitiated, shmeckle is a Yiddish word for stuff in the male nether region.]  I laughed and said, “No, honey.  That says Scott!”  Months later at a pizza parlor, with a similar toilet paper holder he once again ran his little fingers across the letters, “W – E – Y – E – R – H – A – U – S – E – R…” and with a very puzzled and concerned look on his little face turned to me, sighed and said, “Where’s Scott?”

 

The difference in perception between adults and children is also fabulously fertile soil to grow funny situations for me, partly because of the twisted wiring in my brain.  Recently I gave one of my piano students a sticker of a cartoon character as a reward and she asked why cartoon characters wear gloves.  Wanting only to swiftly move on to the next song, I told her that maybe cartoon land was a really cold place and they needed to keep those four fingers warm.   As I turned the page she grew quite concerned and commented that not ALL the characters wore gloves, just a few of them, and wouldn’t the others be cold, too?  Not sure how to get out of this new turn in the conversation I blurted out that maybe these cartoon characters were really undercover CSI agents always on the lookout for clues in Disneyland or maybe THEY were the criminals and didn’t want to leave fingerprints anywhere when they were stealing fresh-baked pies off of Daisy or Minnie’s windowsill.  We never made it to the next song in her book, as the scenarios kept growing until I looked at the clock and realized that our lesson time was almost over, so I closed her music book and said perhaps Mickey and Goofy were really just scared of germs.

 

I can’t wait to hear about her family’s next amusement park visit.