Fall

The World’s Slowest Eater hopped off her chair in the middle of dinner – pasta and carrots. There was some cheese but it disappeared long ago, and since she was demanding pasta all day, literally asking for spaghetti since breakfast, I would have thought she would actually eat it instead of running off.

“Hey, where are you going?” I asked.

“My napkin falled,” my daughter replied innocently.

Oops. Okay, well, then let’s take this opportunity for a little grammar lesson. At 3 ½ she’s eventually gonna need to know verb tenses and stuff.

“Fell,” I told her. “Your napkin fell.”

Blank stare.

“It works like this,” I began. “When your napkin goes on the ground, when it’s already on the ground, it fell; when it is happening, or if you were going to the ground, you fall. So, I fall, you fall; but when it’s over, you fell, not falled. Fell.”

She smiled.

“Got it? Fell.”

“Yeah, but I still gotta go get it,” she said.

Then she bent over and grabbed the napkin, and hopped back into her chair. A forkful of pasta was quickly consumed after the brief delay.