A couple of years back, Celene & Thad gave Stella this book. It has, apparently, been around since the olden days, and – much as the title suggests – goes to great pains to teach one how to not speak like they was raised in that there trailer.

This book’s target audience is for the 9-12 crowd, and so you can imagine it’s effectiveness on a three year old. Nevermind that the main goal with a three-year-old is to not have them yell things at you. So naturally we figured the next logical step is to teach her the proper use of WELL and GOOD.

The way the book works is that all the parts of speech and undesirable uses of tense and pronunciation are presented as characters. More specifically, they are little stick drawings with creepy faces and long, spider-like arms. They are shady characters who do things like always exclude G from their fun summertime activities (goin, playin, runnin, fishin). Poor little G. The kid with the inhaler left at the swim dock while everyone else gets to go canoin’.

But the reason for this story has not to do with the oft neglected G, or with LY (LY wears a pink dress and “loves action!” I’ll let you interpret the subversive text on that one.), or even that beer-swilling, monster-truck-driving bad-boy GOT (i.e., I ain’t GOT no teefs) – no, this story has to do with MAY. Good old MAY. Of all the forgotten letters, mangled suffixes and superlative prefixes in this book, the one character that Stella has decided to attempt to properly work into her daily conversation is MAY. But as one can quickly guess, Stella’s interpretation of where exactly MAY lives in those sentences has never been fully comprehended – even though we have read this book no less than 50 times.

I find this whole CAN vs. MAY character fairly pretentious and snotty anyway. Nothing is more annoying than asking someone if you can do something and they respond with a haughty, “I don’t know, CAN you?” As far as I am concerned CAN and MAY can go hang out with the improper conjugation of lay. I’ve never liked him either.

So now, when Stella really, really wants something. And wants to impress you with her astute ability in asking for it in a grammatically correct way, you will hear this pleading statement:

“Mommy, Mommy, CAN I please MAY? Please CAN I MAY?”

My baby’s done college bound.