When we were camping, there was a missing knot in the bench of the picnic table, leaving a hole. Evie asked what it was for and, because I take the “Calvin’s dad” philosophy of question answering*, I naturally told her it was for “toots”.

Let me back up a second and explain toots. We didn’t have any cutesy names for bodily functions when I was a kid, we called a spade a spade. When Evie was younger, Sara asked me what names we should use for things and I was like, “huh?” It just didn’t occur to me that you should make ups some silly phrase. It doesn’t make it any more polite people, talking about farts in the first place is what’s rude, not using the word fart. That being said, when Evie says “toots” it’s the darned cutest thing you could ever imagine the world.

So anyway, I told her the hole was for toots, not thinking much of it. The “toot hole” (as Evie called it) must really have captured her imagination. She went around telling everybody about the toot hole and spend a decent amount of time trying to toot on the toot hole. It wasn’t long before the origin of the phrase was traced back to me.

Time passes and I don’t think much about it. Then one day we were sitting out on the back porch and she said, “My red chair has a toot hole!” See, her chair is one of those plastic ones and it has a hole so that (presumably) the water can drain off. I had long since forgotten about the original toot hole and the fact that she remembered it took me by surprise. This brought another round of Evie doing her darndest to toot on the hole. Not as funny as the first time, since I now had the sinking feeling she wasn’t going to forget about this one.

Fast forward to this week. Evie and I were pretending to go camping, one of her favorite games. Evie was telling me a big story about her imaginary, fully-featured lawn chair. It was blue with yellow arm rests. It had all the features, cup holders, a thing to lie back in, and, of course, a toot hole.

Don’t say I never taught you nothin’ kid.

* I couldn’t find a good copy of the Calvin and Hobbs strip I was looking for to embed in this post, but you can see a grainy one here. It’s kind of hard to read, so I will reproduce the text:

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That’s really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If their world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?