Our New Motto

Our 3-year-old son Liam has taken up the bizarre habit of licking his baby brother on the forehead. Yes, licking him. It's strange and unsettling, but for our household it seems par for the course. Simply telling Liam "No! Don't Lick the Baby!" doesn't seem to have any effect, so Jen composed the following catchphrase, which we as a family have adopted as our new motto:

No lickin' ... unless it's chicken!

Liam enjoys the rhyme so much that it successfully distracts him from the licking of 6-month-old Carter (aka "Baby Goose," which is another story altogether). However, he has started responding to our cries of "No Lickin' ..." with the response "Baby Chicken! Baby Chicken!"  Which I take to mean either Liam thinks his baby brother is a small chicken, or he is simply asserting that Carter tastes like chicken.

All this talk of babies and chickens reminds me of an experience I had while living in Jamaica as an exchange student many years ago. One particular weekend* I visited some other exchange students at the Bonnyview Hotel in Port Antonio. One of the people in the group was an attractive girl from Belgium. Her English was actually quite good, but she could not recall a particular word, so she asked me, "What is it you call the children of the chicken?"  The word she was thinking of was "chick," and she wanted someone to explain to her why somebody referred to her as a "hot children of the chicken." She apparently heard someone thought she was a "hot chick," and in the failed attempt at translation she conjured up an image of a frying egg, which must have seemed vaguely like an insult.  

I feel compelled to note that Children of the Chicken would make a great name for a band. Perhaps I should keep a running archive of all the great potential band names I stumble onto in the writing of this blog. For those keeping track, so far we have "Fruits of Sheer Whimsy" and now "Children of the Chicken."

(* It ended up being a whole week because of a road-wrecking mudslide, but again, that's another story altogether. It seems the Bonnyview Hotel is now called the Fern Hill Club Hotel. Too bad; I don't recall any ferns, but the view was indeed bonny.)