Repeat After Me
Kids are a lot like those rainbow-bodied parrots that squawk everything you say back to you. It’s rewarding when they pick up pleases and thank yous to add to their vocabulary and horrifying when they learn the forbidden four-lettered words and decide to blurt them out to the nice old neighbor babysitting them.

Our little sponges also have a talent for letting our secret plans slip through their pores. This dad is lucky it turned out to be a movie re-enactment and not an escape plan. That week of not knowing whether his toddler was haunted by ghosts, repeating his wife’s hype-up exercise to leave, or simply parroting movie lines must have been an awkward one.