“#1 means pee-pee. #2 means poop. #3 means all mixed up.”
- On euphemisms
“Let’s go by grandmama’s house, so I can see what I want.”
- On getting stuff “At the end of time, everything – even baby George – will be made out of metal.”
- On the future “There are two things I think are so stupid: making bad choices and throwing up.”
- On what to avoid
“Mommy, put baby George back in his cage.”
- On newborn care
“I’m a pirate. We don’t use patience, because we’re tough and boozy.”
- When told to be patient “It’s good to have a bike with pedals, because when there’s doo-doo, you just pedal right through it.”
- On cycling “Earwax tastes awful, but boogers are deeeee-licious.”
- On matters of taste
“Mommy, you have your truth, and I have my truth.”
- On the subjective nature of truth, after being caught in a bold-faced lie
“I love you all the way to Pluto and then to Saturn and back to earth and to Antarctica and then to Australia to a man who says G’Daaaaay Maaaate and then home.”
- Describing the depths of his love
“No. Not yet.”
- Pretending to be a doctor, when asked if Daddy’s tummy was OK “You can’t just kick somebody. First, you have to say ‘Please, may I kick your body?'”
- On the polite way to go about kicking somebody “This is as yummy as a bush is to a skunk!”
- On the deliciousness of mac & cheese “Dad, you smell like G-Daddy (his grandfather). Half sweaty, half cookies.”
- On personal odors
“Daddy, I have a button and it makes a pipe come down from the roof and suck you up. But I will only push it if you do not give me Mac and Cheese.”
- Learning the finer points of extortion “I wish homeless people were snails, so that when it rains, they could go in their shells.”
- On social issues “If you’re looking for me, I’ll be wherever I am.”
- On how to find him “Hey dad, why don’t you trade that ‘or’ for an ‘and’?”
- When offered a choice between having a cookie now OR having one later “Daddy- why do you ALWAYS not know Korean?”
- On his frustration that I can’t read him his cousin’s Korean-language piano book “You know….dinosaurs, fish, monsters, ninjas….Wait- Did I say ‘sharks’?”
- On Christmas Wishes “As you grow, the brain gets bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter. And I have the smartest brain of all.”
- On brain development, and modesty “I know what to do. I think we should call the police.”
- On how his teacher should handle a classmate who had just bitten him “Chimpanzees have a lot of things people have- they have muscles and fingers and hair and teeth and eyes and babies. But you know what they don’t have? Suitcases.”
- On Anthropology “The British are making me so sleepy.”
- Henry, found asleep on the floor next to a globe “I wish I lived in Somalia, so I could do whatever I want.”
- After learning that Somalia is “lawless” “A lot of things happened back when it was all just dinosaurs and naked people.”
- On prehistory “This is going to be cool. Star Wars cool.”
- On coolness standards
“You mean on the high voltage transmission lines?”
- When asked “Do you see the birds on that wire up there?” “When you are one year old, you only have one brain, but when you are two, you have two brains. I have three and three quarters brains.”
- On the topic of intelligence “How come nobody knows what things are called in Chinese?”
- After unsuccessfully asking 3 different people if they knew how to say ‘rainbow’ in Chinese. (It’s ‘jiàng’) “Food goes from your esophagus to your small intestines. Then, it turns into poops and peeps.”
- On the workings of the digestive system