Fire Truck

“Fire truck! Daddy, I see a fire truck!” This is what my daughter cried out on Halloween this year as we sat on the side of the road. We were taking a break from collecting loot and candy. No, there wasn’t a fire. The local volunteer fire department drives through our neighborhood (and others) every Halloween and Christmas. My son loves fire trucks and has spent hours and hours educating his sister on the subtleties of the different kinds. She knows a fire truck when she sees one and made sure everyone within earshot knew it was coming.

When my son started speaking, he had a problem with the letter L. Pillow was pronounced “Piwwow.” We weren’t concerned. (There were many times in college when I had a hard time pronouncing almost all the letters. This only tended to happen on the weekends, so I wasn’t that worried about it.) But we did work with him. We made a list of words that started and had the letter L in them. We’d carefully pronounce them. He could hear the difference, but couldn’t quite get his mouth around that one letter. When he learned his letters and started reading, he saw what the letter L looked like. That helped. Now, when we wrote the words with the L’s in them, he saw where it was in the word. Pillow went from “Piwwow” to “Pillllow.” (He was dedicated and persistent)

Now, since my son had the problems with the letter L and the TH, you might think I’d expect the same from my daughter when she started talking. But, she’s lead me down that same path many times. My son was a picky eater; my daughter ate anything that she could catch. My son was a loud sleeper; my daughter never made a peep. My son is surprisingly (considering his mother) agile and coordinated; I don’t think there’s an obstacle my daughter hasn’t first tried to go through.

So, while my wife did her thing, (reading, researching, talking to other parents and generally learning all the options) I knew my daughter would pretty much wake up one day and be completely fluent in English and probably a few other languages. This time, she was not going to fool me.

My son was on the job. Many were the times we’d be driving and I’d hear, “Now, say one.” A moment later, a little voice would chirp, “One.” They worked up to ten in no time. So, with her brother taking care of her vocabulary and counting, I knew my daughter was in good hands. In no time at all, she had one to five down. She even knew those numbers backwards. I found that one out, and also learned that with a five-year old and two and half-year old, you need to pay attention, the hard way. I made the mistake of lying on the floor one fall day to watch a football game. I was aware of the counting down, and didn’t pay it much attention until she landed on my back after what felt like a perfect double flip from the sofa. The giggling from the two of them almost drown out my cry of agony. Now, my back spasms whenever I hear either of them counting backwards from five.

What does this have to do with, “Fire truck! Daddy, I see a fire truck!”? Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know if my son decided that my daughter didn’t really need to have TR in her list of mastered sounds, or if she decided to once again do the exact opposite of what I’d expected. While she’d mastered the important words, like “please” “more” “no” and “I don’t want to take a nap right now because I am not tired and I really know that you want me to take a nap so you can take one too.”, she couldn’t make the TR sound.

You’d be surprised how many words don’t have TR in them. This would probably explain why I didn’t know this until Halloween night. So, while we were sitting in a neighbor’s yard, my kids both dressed as Spiderman (she found her brother’s old Spiderman costume and claimed it as hers. Clifford and Elmo were both discarded as she proclaimed she was going to be Spiderman, like her brother!). Our neighbors walked by and we’d exchange hellos, the kids talking about which houses had the best candy.

When the fire truck, lights flashing, started down the road. My daughter stood and pointed and for the first time, I found out that she couldn’t pronounce TR. When a three-year old can’t say TR, you might be wondering just what does she use to replace those two letters? Well, my daughter proudly proclaimed that a “Fire f__k” was coming down the street. Somehow, I don’t think the people at Marvel Comics would have approved of her Spiderman impersonation.