Since Eli joined the family this past May, I have been feeling all kinds of feelings about Finley, my little independent, sensitive, affectionate 4-year-old. I have been fluctuating between feeling like he's falling between the cracks in true middle child fashion [Lucas gets more one-on-one school time and craves a lot of affirmation; Sebastian, while not the true baby of the family anymore, still requires the attention that a baby of the family/still too recently usurped baby of the family would demand; and Eli needs the attention that an actual baby needs - it doesn't leave much for the kid who is usually content watching others, following along, or independently doing his own thing] and feeling like the main attention we give him is to question why he isn't acting older than his age [he is left to his own devices, curiously/absentmindedly/mischievously does something he maybe shouldn't, and gets soundly reprimanded with a barrage of "Why would you do that? You're old enough to know better. What kind of example are you setting for your younger brothers?" Rinse and repeat.]. [Wow, that was like a Paul Writing to Galatians length sentence...] Sigh. It is not a great feeling and it is definitely an area that I've been brainstorming about for remedies. Time and energy are in short supply these days, in this particular stage, and I often find myself choosing the easy instead of the intentional, and Finley doesn't deserve that.
But that is a whole other post for another time. Moving on.
Tonight's post is supposed to be simply about wegs. What are wegs, you ask? I have wegs. You have wegs. All God's people have wegs. [An Andy Griffith Show joke...] Wegs are what you get when your 4-year-old is talking about legs and cannot pronounce L's. Good old wegs. Finley loves to talk about wegs. He either hurt his weg or he created a monster with funny wegs or he has an itch on his weg or he needs his wegs lotioned. You get the picture.
One day a long time ago, I pretended I didn't know what wegs were and the boys found it absolutely hilarious, so obviously, the joke has been repeated many times over. Finley knows we're just playing with him and has never indicated he's bothered by his inability to say legs correctly. I personally love his wegs and hoped he would forever call them wegs, but as you may have gathered from the title of this post, alas, this is not to be.
Last week, Finley was drawing a collection of pictures for a book he was making and he wanted to write the title on it all by himself. I could hear him start to get frustrated when what he was writing wasn't a word he expected to read. He had written "All of hde" across the top. I asked him what he wanted it to say and he told me it was supposed to say "All of the underwater creatures." I immediately saw his problem before he needed to explain further. Being the adorable 4-year-old that he is, all of his "th" sounds come out like "duh." That is "dat" and things are "dings" and the is "duh." He knew there was supposed to be an H and silent E in there, but he couldn't remember where the D went... Poor kid. I obviously helped him spell out his title [and he did a great job on all of his letters, by the way] and also explained, yet again, how "the" only sounds like there's a D because the "th" sound is hard to make for little kids.
Well, a couple days after that, one of his school lessons for the day was actually about TH words, and it mentioned how to make the "th" sound by touching your tongue to your top teeth. He gave it a try and was met with some degree of success. He was able to clearly read aloud a few TH words with much flying spit and extreme concentration, which pleased him immensely. Of course, one exposure to this hint didn't do much for his regular speech and he continued to be all dis and dat and dings. But, in the middle of this teaching moment, I mentioned how making the L sound was created in a similar way and he gave it a few tries as well.
Fast forward a few more days and I am in the boys' room, waking Sebastian up from his nap and extracting soggy paper corners from Eli's mouth, and Finley runs in to tell me something about wegs and then runs out. I, as per usual, pretended I didn't know what wegs were, expecting the burst of giggles and protestations that usually come from this joke. However, this time, instead of our usual back and forth weg banter, Finley solemnly came back into the room, stood up ramrod straight, thrust out his chin, put his tongue between his teeth, and slowly said, "LEGS." There was bubbling from his mouth and spit shooting places and such a look of strain and concentration on his face, but there was 100% an L sound.
And while I heartily congratulated him and told him how impressed I was with his accomplishment [because it was very clear he was incredibly proud of himself], I felt such a pang of feelings. So many emotions. Ugh. Was he trying to change his speech because he discovered he could or because he felt like, because of our teasing, he needed to or maybe that we wanted him to? If the former, fine, I'll have to deal with my little boy growing up in yet another way. But what if it's the latter reason? Sigh. Parenting, man. It's all about overthinking everything.
And that's that. Wegs may sadly be on the way out, so, obviously, I will never, ever, ever, ever make a wegs joke again. Ever. I need the wegs to stick around as long as possible.
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| look at those two cute wegs |
