Speaking in code

Last night I bought a baby-sized basketball standard for Isaac. This morning we were lying in bed, babe jabbering between us, when Eddie turned to me and said, "I'm going to take Isaac and play basketball." Since the standard was still in pieces in the box, I said, "Why don't you leave him with me while you set it up?" Isaac looked at me, shook his head, said "ball," rolled over me to get off the bed, and followed his dad out of the room.

His own vocabulary consists of about twelve words (up from the three I reported last week), but 15 month-old Isaac doesn't miss much. After dinner, as soon as I mention the word "bath," he's halfway up the stairs. It's at about this time with the older two kids that we started speaking in code: either spelling or speaking Pig Latin.

But with older kids who are almost four and approaching six, both of our code languages are losing their secrecy. Bryce can decipher almost anything we spell, and even Annie can figure out most shorter words, like in this scenario:

Me (dying for a break so badly that even a trip to the pharmacy to pick up a new inhaler is a treat): Ok, I'll see you in a few minutes.

Eddie: Where are you going?

Me: T-A-R-G-E-T

Annie: Can I come? I wanna look at the My Little Ponies! Can I please come look at the My Little Ponies?

And the Pig Latin, while it still tends to confuse them more than spelling does, has it's shortcomings too, like in this conversation from last night.

Me (to Eddie): oo-Day oo-yay ant-way oo-tay oh-gay oo-tay annie-Nay, ick-Phee-May?

Bryce: Are we going to go see Nanny McPhee?

When Eddie was a newly-returned missionary and I had just come back from working in a Belgian bakery, we spoke a cute (annoying to everyone else) little amalgamation of Russian, French and English. But ten years later, we can hardly remember our English, let alone the Russian and French.

From time to time when I was little, my parents used to go into their bedroom and shut the door. When I was a kid, I always wondered what they were doing. When I was a teenager, I was afraid to think about what they might be doing. Now that I'm a parent, I know exactly what they were doing-- trying to have a conversation away from the alert little ears of their children.

--originally published 1/28/06