The other night my three year old appeared in the hallway about fifteen minutes after we had put her to bed.

I’m not sure what set her off, the gentle rain on the roof, the bathroom fan in the basement forty feet away, but she yelled the following, presumably at me though it might have been at any number of people or inanimate objects whose placement in that moment rubbed her the wrong way, “This is all your fault! And Good Luck! For the REST of YOUR LIFE!” before storming back to her bed and falling asleep almost instantly. I didn’t even have time to fire up the video camera for the blooper reel.

So it was a welcome surprise when Ellie quietly asked, “Mommy, how do you spell comb?”

I told her, “c-o-m-b.”

“There’s a b? That doesn’t make sense. Mom, I said cOm, not comB.”

I explained that comb is a tricky word and there are a couple of others like it with a silent “b” on the end like ‘lamb’ and ‘climb.’

She looked at me as though I had two heads and said, “Whatever Momb.”

I have to agree. Some of those words are just dumb.