Playing the Alphabet Game

Last Thursday, Joy and I packed up the family and drove to Illinois so I could attend a conference on music in small towns hosted by my old workplace Millikin University and so Joy could hang out with our friends in Champaign.

The trip over there took a long time - we had an hour's worth of errands to run before we could get out of town and then lunch took over an hour as we juggled two kids, four meals, and a line in the restaurant about 10 deep. Trying to keep Sam entertained was entertaining itself, so Joy decided to play the alphabet game with Sam.

She told him the ground rules and then pointed to a passing sign, exclaiming "I see an 'A' in 'Auto!'" Sam quickly caught on, almost too well. He would sign the alphabet song to the next letter, declare we were looking for "D," and then start looking on every sign. And when he got stumped, there was always pterodactyl. On that "D," Sam couldn't find one and so said, "Hey, my friend pterodactyl is flying next to the car. And look, he has a sign in his hand. And on that sign is the letter D. Look, look, pterodactyl has a D."

Sometimes we wished he had made up a sign instead of reading what he saw. While looking for "G," Sam suddenly yells out, "I see a G in that sign that says 'Girls! Girls! Girls!" Joy quickly said, "And I see a "G" on a sign over there." Thankfully we got to put off the "What does XXX" mean for a few days - he didn't notice that element of the sign until we were driving back yesterday.