How Do You Have Fun With Your Grandparents?

This was the first grade writing prompt my boy was given in school the other day. It came home in a giant pile of papers, and we almost missed it. Which would have been very sad, because we would have missed his answer. Which was. . .

"I play wii with my grandpa. I beat him everytime because he is a handicap."

We laughed. It's okay to laugh. It's a funny sentence.

My boy is very competitive.

He is also a bit too young to understand the important connotational difference between someone having a handicap and someone being a handicap.

Remember when you were too young to worry about being politically correct? When you were able to say something that is true about someone you loved without worrying about the fact that you might say it wrong and sound like a jerk without meaning to?

Wasn't that nice?

My boy meant no disrespect. He knows that his beloved pop is handicapped the same way he knows that Pop is a boy and that Pop loves football and that Pop will always share his BBQ chips and that Pop is terrible at wii.

In my boy's eyes, Pop's handicap is nothing to be sad about, nothing to worry about, and nothing to pretend doesn't exist. It is nothing more than a way for a young boy to gain a slight advantage in a wii tennis match.

Pretty amazing, no?