Monkeymonkey!

I thought I'd take a break from the whole "Confessions of a First-Time Homebuyer" thang and tell you all a little story I squirreled away in the back of my mind as blog post fodder. It surfaced this morning as I dropped my breakfast toast and it landed on the floor peanut butter side down. As it hit I shouted, "Monkeymonkey!"

Stretch, my sister's husband, grew up in a duplex in Philadelphia. The other half of the duplex was occupied by people who became fast friends with his family, especially Stretch and the neighbor's son. When they eventually got married they were in each other's wedding parties. Ditter and Friend's Missus have become really good friends as well.

One by one, first the Friends, the Friend's parents, and then Ditter and Stretch and Stretch's parents moved into the same development in Lancaster County, Pa. Ditter lives across the street and two doors down from the Friends, and the Friends Sr. live down the street the other way and around a corner. Stretch jokes that they should petition to get the street renamed to the one they all left.

The Friends had a baby two years ago, a sweet, precocious little girl they named Michaela. One of Michaela's favorite activities is riding on the vacuum cleaner. Friend will push it around on the floor while she stands on the front, hanging on to the handle. Here's the thing: these rides never occur while the machine is actually being used to sweep the floor. It has never been running while she was in the room. In her mind this object is nothing but a toy.

So one day, Friend decides he needs to sweep the floor. He drags the vacuum out of the closet, turns around and plugs it in. Michaela sees her hobbyhorse is out and she clambers onto it. Friend turns the machine on. It roars to life, Michaela leaps off of it and runs across the room. Friend turns the vacuum off to see if she's okay.

She is furious, red-faced, her hands balled up into fists.

"Monkeymonkey!" she shouts at Friend.

Proof that even as early as two the impulse to swear is in there somewhere.

Friend's Missus told Ditter that story, and when we visited them last Christmas, Ditter relayed it to us. "Monkeymonkey" has been adopted by us as a substitute swear word.