GIMME SOME SUGAR!!

Sweetpea stays with us when her Mama goes on business trips, sleeping upstairs in her room, and being trundled back and forth to school and activies.   Night before last, her reader featured a new version of the old Kissing-a-Frog tale, with a Princess enchanted this time by an angry witch, and doomed to live as a frogess until a Prince should kiss her.     The story featured quite a few words in Spanish, so as we read in turn, each taking several voices and parts, I would translate and teach her to pronounce the unfamiliar words.  

The tale was of a Viceroy’s family (short explanation of King, in Spain, and you know how we have a Vice President?---who is second in command?---well, Roy is the word for King, and so Viceroys were in command in Mexico because they were the King’s Second people, etc. representing him there.  So that  part was well-received and remembered.

Then came the losing of the Viceroy’s son’s golden arrow down the well, with the promise for its return, etc., as “You will let me eat from your plato, 




and sleep beside you in your cama, 

and (most important), give me a beso in the morning.”

And so, with the several repetitions of this promise, and her excellent memory and inflection on the words---Man, we were moving right along.  And so to sleep.

Yesterday, at breakfast, I said, “Tell Ganner the story of the PRINCE and the Frog,” and away she went---Viceroy explanation included, and arrow in the well, and promise.  Now, that promise was smooth sailing the night before, and she launched into eating from the plato, and sleeping in the cama with flying colors.  Then, somehow, her new-found knowledge and the similarity of the words conflued to hatch an innocent joke that we’d have had to hide to laugh.

She finished her tale with a grandiose accent and a flourish: “And he promised to give her a PESO in the morning!”

And if you do laugh, how do you explain THAT one?