We’ve been in Georgia for about 3 days now and, despite my best efforts, I am sounding like a true southern bell. 

After leaving church Sunday morning, we went to lunch in a little place in downtown Columbus.  Amy, the kids and I piled into the car and drove to the restaurant, giving the kids a pre-meal pep talk on the way.  Sadie and Seth, like most kids, only have about a dozen dishes that they will eat between them.  The pep talk was more necessary than normal because we were going to a new restaurant and neither Amy nor I had any idea what was going to be on the menu.  After big sweeping reminds about “using manners and words,” I turned around in my chair and asked Sadie if she was going to be a Good Girl and eat all of her Suppa. 

She said, “What’s SUPPA?”
I was like, “Oh, right. I meant lunch.”

I swear, since that moment, my internal narrator has gone southern.  Every thing’s all “I do declare” and “that is MAH-velous” and “these green beans are exquisite!”  It’s providing a stark contrast to the modern British English that had overtaken my internal dialogue before I left on this trip as a result of reading a Nick Hornby book.  Soon after I read the Hornby book (SLAM), I picked up my well-worn copy of Middlesex and I, not knowing the true depths of confusion that lay before me, thought I was all messed up.  I lamented the fact that every time I was reading the self-proclaimed Homeric Ramblings of JefferyEugenides, I was reading all sorts of “bloody”‘s and “crickies”‘s between the lines.  You can only imagine how scrambled I am now, reading Sandra Cisneros’s La Casa en Mango Street by day while watching Harry Potter and/or The Antique’s Road Show by night (depending on who’s in control of the remote), and engaging in conversation with the most sterotypically southern accented family that you can possibly imagine.  My internal dialogue sounds something like this: “I do declare, gov’ner, it is bloody hot on the porch esa manana.”

On a less southern (or at least less mannered) note, the That’s What She Said moments for which Sadie and Seth are so famous have returned today with style.  I won’t tell on them on the blog, lest they grow up to hate me some day.  I will tell on Amy, though.  Today when we were getting the kids dressed for bed, she was trying to convince Seth to go potty before he got zipped up into his footie pajamas.  She said, “Seth, do you need to go potty?”  Of course, he said no.  So she tried again, saying, “Seth, are you sure? You might as well give it a try.  You know it’s always so much easier to do it when your pants are already off.”