Reason # 3,526

Reason # 3,526... Alternate Title "The Literal Girl"...

Bean had a book report due this week.  The style of story for this report was "Fairy Tale".  Pretty easy,right... We have all grown up listening to Fairy Tales...

Once Upon A Time... The Princess, The Prince, The Witch.... These are all pretty common... We've all heard them and learned them and know them inside out...

But not my my girl...

She takes words for what they are.  She is very creative, but she is very literal.  She has a very tough time assigning figurative meanings to words and phrases...

Her Fairy Tale was 'The Frog Prince'... 

The Frog helps the Princess and makes her promise to be friends... She resists and is very mean to the Frog... Over and over again... At the end of the tale, she throws the Frog and it breaks the spell... The Frog turns into a Prince and they fall in love and get married...

Not the story that I would have picked for her, but she picked it out...

We talked about the story several times leading up to writing the book report...

We came to a question that asked 'What was the lesson/ What did you learn?'...

And, in her dead-pan literalism, she turned to me and said...

"If you throw a frog against a wall it turns into a prince..."

This brought flooding back to me memories of how difficult it was to explain what 'a piece of cake' and 'keep an eye out' were to explain to her...

It brought me to think about what other phrases might be difficult...

'Bend over backwards'

'Break a leg'

'Drive me up the wall'

'Everything but the kitchen sink'

'Keep your chin up'

'Kick the bucket'

'Lend me your ear'

'Let the cat out of the bag'

'On the fence'

'Over my dead body'

'Sick as a dog'

'You are what you eat'

I'm sure that there are a million more... Perhaps you can add a few that I should be aware of...