Word play

As we were driving home from church on Easter Sunday, Julia was happily cradling the red egg she received from our priest and chattering about how excited everyone would be to see it when we got home. She then asked me why the egg was red, and I decided to skip the long, complicated explanation about what the color red symbolizes in the Orthodox Church, and instead I answered, "Well, remember we dyed eggs all different colors the other day? I guess the priest decided to dye these eggs red." She sat there quietly absorbing this information for a minute, then responded, "But isn't that silly, Mama? The eggs didn't go up to Heaven!" It took me a minute to realize that between all the talk of the meaning of Easter, plus of course the ongoing discussion of Sleeping Beauty pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, Julia has heard the word "die" quite a lot lately, and has been told that Heaven is the place a person goes after dying. So I then launched into an explanation of the difference between "dye" and "die," which was at least somewhat understood thanks to the fact that Julia had turned to Yia-yia in the middle of church and whispered, "Yia-yia, Mommy told me that you put paint in your hair to make it black," to which Yia-yia responded that it was not really paint (no painting your hair with Dot Art paint, Julia!) but something called hair dye.

In addition to homonyms being a difficult thing for a 3-year-old to understand, so, of course, are puns and plays-on-words. This morning, Ethan started a string of plays on Madeleine's name that had Julia somewhat baffled, but that kept he and I so amused that we ran with it for longer than I think Julia liked. It all started with him saying something to the effect of: "What do you think Madeleine is so sad about? I think we'll have to call her Sad-a-lyn." Followed by: "Or maybe when she's really happy we should call her Glad-a-lyn." To which I dead-panned, "Yeah, and when she's mad, we can call her Madeleine." All somewhat amusing to Julia, but as we continued I think we kind of lost her. Some other potential nicknames:

If she's hanging, we should call her Chad-a-lyn. (or dimpled, Ethan added.)
If she does something really awesome, we can call her Rad-a-lyn.
If she turns into a boy and grows up and has a kid, she can be Dad-a-lyn.
If she turns into a boy and moves to Scotland, we'll call her Lad-a-lyn.
If she turns into a boy and grows up and marries Neva, she can be Thad-a-lyn.

Julia listened to us going back and forth with this, then interjected somewhat nervously, "Uh, no, Daddy, her name is MADELEINE."

A few minutes later, once we were on to another topic, Julia seemed to suddenly find a little more humor in the game, and announced, "Daddy called Madeleine DAD-a-lyn!" "Isn't that silly?" I asked her. "Why do you think he called her Dad-a-lyn?" I thought she might say something like, because he's being silly, because his name is Dad, etc. Instead, her response was: "Because he owns the number four." Oh... I see. THAT'S why.