It's all about the wordplay

So Abby does a lot of writing in school, which I think is a great way for them to learn new words and also to express themselves. She loves to write, and writes some really cute journal entries, which she lets me read.

Her teacher encourages them to spell a word how they think it should be spelled – sounding it out, etc., which is probably a good thing for the teacher’s sanity, otherwise she’d spend all day spelling words for every kid in the class. What it is also good for is comic relief and puzzle solving. Abby brings home papers and I have to read the whole thing and try to translate what it is she’s writing about. I'm great at word puzzles, but sometimes I'm like "whaaaaa....??" Some recent examples:

She was writing a sort of book report/book summary about a girl who stays home sick from school. The first thing that leaps out at me from the page are the words “gast facking.” WHAT? What kind of books are my second grader reading? So I read the entire thing and figure out that the girl stayed home from school even though she wasn’t really sick. She was gast facking. Or, if you speak English, “just faking.”

She wrote a journal entry about things she likes to eat, and said that once she’s done with dinner, she’s going to have “a hagmucis ice crim sanwich.” I obviously got the ice cream sandwich part, but was stumped over “hagmucis” and also, it sounded gross. When I asked her what that meant, she said it was “humungous.”

Her journal entries are super cute – she talks a lot about Piper and how cute she is and how much she loves her. She also wrote this whole entry about how Riley is mean and never nice to her and a lot of very unflattering examples of how Riley is awful, and then finishes it with how Riley is actually not that bad, as sisters go. On the other hand, Riley is currently writing a fictional story where Abby is a total brat, so I feel that as long as it’s only literary retaliation, it’s ok. They get along great 90% of the time, and for that I am hagmucisly thankful.