Mevaseret seemed to be a precocious child. She talked quite
fluently at the age of year and a half and seemed to have
intuited some grammatic rules. But I soon realized she didn't
always understand what she was saying.
We were taking Mevaseret's new baby brother, Benny, for one
of his first outings when a neighbor stopped us.
"What's your little brother's name?" she asked my young
daughter.
Mevasseret thought for a moment. She knew the answer to the
question, "What's your name." But being that her brother was
so new, she wasn't sure what to say. It took a moment or two
before she finally replied,
"Mevassron."
*
Mevasseret sometimes found it difficult to make sense out of
the world. At a sheva brochos, she turned to me and in
a sweet, but very loud, voice, asked me, "Ima, why is he
saying `Asher yotzar' when he didn't go to the
bathroom?' "
*
Sometimes life seemed to be unfair. Mevasseret was born in
the month of Nissan, when there are no kindergarten sessions.
It was inevitable that she miss out on a birthday celebration
for her first year in gan.
"But, Ima," she complained, "if I don't have a birthday,
everybody will think I was never born!"
*
We sent Benny to a Yiddish-speaking cheder where he picked up
the language quickly, to our pride, though he did get
confused at times.
When his father asked him how Yosef revealed himself to his
brothers, he thought the answer was obvious.
Yosef said, "Ich bin Yoissef!"
*
Shir-el had a charming and original way of speaking Hebrew,
but most of her inventions are impossible to translate. I can
offer her Hebrew version of a feathered friend,
kweenween, which she used for `penguin.'
I also remember receiving from her a long and serious science
lecture explaining to me that when you turn the lights off,
it gets dark. The next one down in line, Chanale, then asked
me if I was going to turn the darkness on.
*
[Now that you've begun recording the clever statements,
Drora, we're sure there'll be more to come. How about you,
readers? Any beguiling submissions of this kind? FAX 02-
5387998 or send to Weinbach, Panim Meirot 1, Jerusalem.]
