Numnah....What??

This may be old news to some of you but that's the way I've been operating this summer.... behind on everything.

Last night I was tired. So tired that I wanted to do a lot of nothing. I laid myself right down on the couch, closed my eyes and before I knew what hit me, I was asleep. Then one of the girls came in and announced she was going to have a piece of cherry pie. I said I'd like to have one too, could she get it for me? Her response was, "well then you better get up and get in here if you want any pie." Hello? How many times have I gotten pie for you? How about sharin' the love here? So I got up and got my own pie.

Then we sat down on the couch to find something worthwhile to watch. There's not much to pick from in the summer. I suggested the National Spelling Bee. The girls didn't think that sounded appealing as "the spellers are all nerds." (Hey, be careful there. I was in the school and county spelling bee several times as a kid.) The youngest suggested American Gladiators. Yuk. Double-yuk. I convinced them we could watch the spelling bee and switch to the gladiators (yuk) on commercials. Ok, that worked.

I'm a good speller. I read a lot. I do word puzzles. But where do they get these words for the spelling bee? I'd never heard of them before. I couldn't pronounce them. What's their origin? Hello? Is that really necessary? For fun these kids read the dictionary. One gal had read it seven times. 7 times. And it was F.U.N. Are you kidding? The same gal had studied multiple languages - - Greek, Latin, Spanish. How can a 12 year old be fluent in multiple languages and we've got workers at Taco Bell that can't even speak English? There's something wrong here but that's another post.

The funniest part of what we saw was a young boy was asked to spell NUMNAH. The look on his face and the reaction of the audience were great. Yeah, you know what they thought they heard. NUMNUT. Talk about a sigh of relief when he realized NUMNUT wasn't actually the word.

What's a numnah? A cloth or fabric that is placed between a horse and it's saddle.