Our son and daughter have something in common. They both loved to play with the alphabet magnets on the fridge. Boy, if those letters could talk… oh the stories they could tell. You can sense it just looking at them. Scratched, scarred, chewed, abandoned, thrown, drown, colored and just plain abused – they’ve suffered every indignity a child could throw at ’em.

I tell you this though, they’ve done their duty. Adam loves to spell things, and it started with those little magnetized letters.

Now he’s moved on to crayons and paper, and almost every day we get a drawing that includes a list of the words he can spell: mommy, daddy, memere, pepere, and his latest: Ace.

Ace?

Last week we had a little accident. Mind you, that doesn’t make last week special. Heck, it wouldn’t make any day in the last three years special. It comes with the territory when you’re three (that or he gets a lack of coordination from his mother’s side of the family). Maybe you’re familiar with Ace too? Yeah, that Ace – of bandage fame. We’ve got a reusable, soft ice pack that we haul out when the water works are particularly heavy. It’s the king of all placebos, as far as I’m concerned. We slap that thing on and the kids calm right down.

Adam is usually quick to point out the letters of a word he sees. “Look dad, there’s an A!” He’s been able to identify them correctly for some time now, but lately he wants to know what they spell. Most of these words are promptly forgotten, or if they aren’t, they’re not deemed worthy of the list. Not Ace though. He asked me about the letters he saw on his ice pack last weekend, and Ace has been on the list ever since.

As long as daddy makes it on the list first, I think I’m o.k. with that.