Has your kid
ever had a really bad case of “whyahrhea”? Is your littlest one a “stocktease”? And how can you explain
your most recent “clandes-dine” behavior?
These are not
trick questions. But if you find that your vocabulary is lacking, simply refer
to the latest volume of New Jersey dad Eric Ruhalter’s The KidDictionary: A Book Of Words Parents Need But Don’t Have. A
self-proclaimed word-loving “Lexiconnoisseur,” Ruhalter has written a go-to
guide for defining our children’s most indescribable behavior. In it, you’ll
find that “whyahrhea” is an inquisitive toddler’s chain of rapid-fire
questions; a “stocktease” is a child who lets you buy large quantities of their
favorite food and then suddenly decides that they don’t like it anymore; and
“clandes-dine” is hiding from one’s child while eating a cookie so they don’t
ask for one too.
“As soon as I
started having kids it became apparent that there weren’t words to describe
what they were doing…Parenthood needed a whole new language,” Ruhalter, a
producer at AMC, explains.
Life with his
wife, Kara, his twelve-year-old son, Jaxen, and nine-year-old twins, Maya and
Crosby, is easier and more amusing when Ruhalter makes up words to describe
those crazy situations that kids get themselves into. What began as a fun blog
post of made-up words to poke fun at parenting soon blossomed into a
full-fledged book, complete with pronunciation keys and descriptive flourish. Naturally,
raising three kids has provided him with plenty of material to build new and
creative rhetoric.
“There was a lot
of ‘garbofalaging’ in our house,” Ruhalter explains, admitting to the act of hiding
kid artwork underneath piles of garbage. “For awhile we had some
‘phantomolition,’” he continues, “which is when something gets broken, but nobody did it.”
As any parent
knows, having children around the house can often mean that your sense of humor
goes out the window. But Ruhalter declares that The KidDictionary is a nice antidote to the mundane side of
parenting.
“Humor is
therapeutic,” he says. “I’ve gotten emails from moms who have said that their
kids have done something that would have really upset, angered or frustrated
them and they remembered a word from the book and they just laughed instead. I
was really proud of that.”
And while you
might think that a family like the Ruhalters spends their weekends completing The New York Times crossword puzzle
together, their extracurricular activities are more typical of a tight-knit,
local family: “We’re spending most of our free time
at some little league field or soccer field.”
Ruhalter
has a word for activities like that: research.
For more words, fun videos
and a look inside The
KidDictionary, visit thekiddictionary.com.
