OmegaDotter is learning to sound out letters in preschool. This is very cool, and she is going around quietly testing out different beginning word sounds, checking to see if they're right.

"Puh...Puh...Puh..."

Push? Pull? Put? Pear? Porch?

"Puh...Puh...Puh..."

Protruding? Penitentiary? Pluripotent? Peptide? Polyvinylchloride?

"Puh...Puh...Ptooey!"

Ah. There's my girl.

Many years ago when OmegaDad and I moved into this area, we used to go on exploratory daytrips with the OmegaParents. One route led us through a spot on the road called Pulliam. In Pulliam, there was a convenience store-cum-restaurant owned by a Polish family; they served very good Polish food in the little resstaurant area of the store (I think the brother-in-law had been a chef in Poland).

They had painted this little building bright Pepto-Bismol pink.

You'd be driving along through the high chapparal, everything browns and muted greens and dirt and scrub and rock and sky as far as the eye could see...

And you'd drive around a curve and there would be this excruciatingly PINK building. The family nicknamed it the "Pink Polish Palace in Pulliam"

OmegaDad and I soon developed a road travel game. You had to come up with a sentence full of "p"-words, ending in "the Pink Polish Palace in Pulliam".

Like: "Protestant Pastor Patrick preached poetically about Purgatory at the Pink Polish Palace in Pulliam."

Or: "Princess Pollyanna picked perfect pink peonies, poppies and purple petunias at the Pink Polish Palace in Pulliam."

Or: "Porcupines promenade on the porch of the Pink Polish Palace in Pulliam."

OmegaDad usually can get on a roll, spitting out one riff after another on the theme. I, however, usually get stuck, searching for the perfect Pink Polish Palace pronouncement...

No doubt this all sounds very nerdy, but we are the type of people who just love playing with words and sounds. We can while away large chunks of travel time playing this game and the license plate game ("205 ABT" becomes "two hundred and five archeopteryxes beating triceratops", then "two hundred and five attractively built teenagers", then...). OmegaDotter is still a little bit young for the profuse pleasures of the Pink Polish Palace game, but she sounds like she's coming along very nicely.

In the meantime, I hope I haven't perpetrated a peculiar plague of "p" pollysyllablism upon people who peruse this piece.

Technorati: Phonics, games, car games, word play