Cheapskate?

This morning L and I were headed over to the high school to watch my brother play in a state Special Olympics basketball tournament. We went out our back door, near the dog pen, and proceeded to the car, at which point I realized that our female Weimaraner was being visited by a large brown male dog. So I shut my kid in the car and told her to stay and went out to scare the dog away. Apparently, I am not scary enough (although my class might not agree with that sentiment after this last week), since the dog decided to come and hang out beside me. I called Stuart, who came home and then called our local police department. Anyhow, long story short, our police chief came to pick up the dog and we were talking about what type of dog it was. L had long since escaped from the car, since the dog was friendly and relatively slow-moving. L had guessed it was a fat chocolate lab, but the police chief was guessing a Chesapeake Bay retriever.

So later in the day, we were home and L was telling me a story with a large cast of imaginary characters. She was telling me that one of them was a dog, and it was a cheap-sape dog. I couldn't figure out what in the world she was talking about? A figment of her imagination? A cheapskate? Finally, it hit me - while my kiddo is a fluent reader, she had never made the connection between "chesapeake" and it's pronunciation, but she HAD heard the word "cheapskate" and thought they were the same thing. I love language connections like that.

Also, tonight L was telling me about a joke she had read in Readers' Digest today. It was about a woman who somehow acquired a bottle with a genie in it, polished it, the genie came out, and the woman was granted one wish. So she wished that her cat would be turned into a handsome man. L explained that the woman "threw herself on him" and then the man said to her "I bet you wish that you hadn't neutered me last week!" As she laughed, I was trying to decide exactly how much of that joke she really understood. "Don't you get it, Mom? His brain is still a cat brain, but it is stuck inside a human body! Isn't that funny?" Yep, I'm willing to go with that for an explanation, and yes, I'll happily act like that is funny, if I don't have to explain to you why she would be upset that he was neutered.