"It was so yummy that I can hardly feel my eye."

You read it right.

That's what Thing 1 said the other day.

I can't remember what he ate that was so yummy, but I don't think I'm soon to forget his creative attempt to articulate what he was feeling in response to aforesaid yumminess.

I am sure I am dating myself now as a very Late Blooming Mom indeed when I say moments like this remind me of an ancient TV show with Art Linkletter, ART LINKLETTER'S HOUSE PARTY, which ran for something like 20 years and was later revived with Linkletter and Bill Cosby as KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS. It can't be quite as obscure as I'm making it out to be, because WIKIPEDIA tells me it's been mentioned on FAMILY GUY, SOUTH PARK and THE SIMPSONS. The basic idea was that Linkletter (and later Cosby) would interview kids and, well, they would indeed say the darnedest things.

My kids oblige daily.
 It's getting so that I don't even notice the mangled English that is their attempt to master their mother tongue. "I'm gooder than you at swimming, "Thing 2 brags to Thing 1. "No you amen't!" proclaims Thing 1. And so it goes on.

They take in what they hear me say like sponges, yet somehow things don't quite come out the same way when uttered from their mouths. "Why are the cars in their lines on the freeway?" Thing 2 asks. She means lanes. "What's an exit?" is Thing 1's question when I say I'm taking the next one. Sounds like an easy concept to explain -- it's the thing you take to get off the freeway, the ramp, the lane, the way you choose to take your car when you leave the freeway to go where you want to go. But somehow this didn't really clear it up for him.

They're piecing together how the world works, using language clues, and the results are sometimes not exactly accurate, yet betray a certain logic.

Perhaps my favorite mistaken assumption the kids are under is that when you kiss, it means you're married. It comes from too many Disney movies in which the princess kisses the prince at the end in a big wedding scene. Somehow, this recently led to my daughter kissing daddy and then proclaiming, with a huge smile, "We're married now!" (Elektra complex, anyone?) And when Thing 1 kissed his sister, he proclaimed that they, too, were suddenly wed. (Ah, incest. I won't be explaining that one to my four-and-a-half year-olds.)

All too soon, they are going to understand way more about the world and I won't have to explain why the car is thirsty and we have to stop for gas, or that we're not in the earth, we're on it ... or that regular TV -- as in, TV not recorded on our TiVo -- has something called commercials.

I'm in no hurry. I realize that right now, I am, to my children, an expert on the world. And I'd better enjoy it now, because in a few years, they will have dethroned me from my lofty perch. They'll be the self-proclaimed experts, and they're going to be explaining it to me.