French and Blank Socks

When Sparky got home from Africa, she asked if she could learn French instead of Spanish since that is the language spoken in Togo. I found an instant immmersion cd set at Sam's Club that promises it is as good or better than Rosetta Stone for under $20. It's at least a start for the remainder of this school year to get her familiar with some words and pharases.

The boys have both decided that they want to learn French too. They've learned a few foods, numbers, simple phrases, and colors.

Caboose was telling me the colors he remembered the other day. In the course of the conversation he couldn't quite remember white, so I told him it was blanc.

So everyone starts saying blanc over and over. It gets a little irritating sometimes, but I try and bite my tongue since they are learning and not intentially trying to annoy me.

Then I told them how they could remember it. White is plain, like blank, like blanc.

So we proceed into a discussion about socks. It's not hard for me to get there. I have a way.

When Buddy was little, as in under 5-ish, he wore the cutest socks. Socks with stuff on them, like dinosaurs, and construction stuff, and firemen stuff, and lizards...you get the idea. He didn't own white socks, because he didn't like, in his own words, "Blank Socks."

Back when we went to my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary celebration at church, for some reason we knew my cousin Jeff liked socks with stuff on them, but grown-up stuff, like paisley or grown-up designs, not plain khaki or black or blue or brown, so Buddy was all pumped about talking non-blank socks. I don't even know if Jeff remembers, but here they were with Buddy counting off all his different ones as he told him.

I have little snippets of his old socks in his scrapbook because I also have fond memories of them. His "blank socks" comment ranks as one of mine and Hubby's favorites.

And now, Buddy only wears blanc socks.