Sweet Niblets! (pronounced: “sweight nibblits”, preferably in a nasal, southern drawl)
The other night I was the featured speaker at a church function. In the midst of my talk, I wanted to reference the material in a one-page handout that we had distributed. Without missing a beat, I found myself telling the audience that the handout contained a “few niblets” for their consideration. As soon as the phrase was out of my mouth (and I saw people’s reaction), I started to explain but thought the better of it. How could I tell people – without completely digressing – that as a father of two girls, ages 13 and 11, I was in my second pass through the Hannah Montana fixation and had just realized that she was now inside MY head too! This incident made me realize that all kinds of Hannah Montana stuff has entered our family’s vernacular. Of course, it’s not my fault. Shana’s the one who uses Hannah Montana sayings and imitates her body language and dance moves. Check it out – if you can stand it…
Actually, a niblet is a small piece of food, as in a single piece of corn. Growing up in the late 1950′s and early 60′s, fresh vegetables weren”t all that common. As such, we rarely got to eat corn on the cob, we mostly ate niblets corn… and learned all of the advertising jingles by heart.
Before last week’s incident, I’d already had another dad/daughter realization. About a month ago on Facebook, someone circulated a list of 239 movies. A friend of mine who loves films passed it on to me. Accordingly to whomever started the list, if you had seen 75 or more of the movies listed you needed to get a life. My friend had seen 175. When I tallied my responses, I found that I’d seen 123. The reason a movie buff like me scored so low was that most of the movies were mid-1980′s and later. If the list had reached back into the 1970′s and early 80′s, I probably would have been off the chart. On the other hand, I’d still seen more of the listed movies than most people because I was able to check off virtually all of the kids and girl movies and a large number of “chick flicks”. Such is the life of a man surrounded by women! Hey, it’s their world and I’m just living in it.
About this point, I guess you don’t want to hear about why men who live among women tend to spend more time on the toilet…
