Hairy-Hairy

I interrupted getting dressed to deal with Kiddo#2 and Kiddo#3 fighting in the bathroom.

K3: “You look like a hairy-hairy!”

K2: “No!”

K3: *hee* “You look like a hairy-hairy!”

K2: “No!”

This could have continued for hours (it did go on for five minutes) but I broke it up, brushed Kiddo#2’s hair, and dispatched them to find other ways of tormenting one another.

From context, I have since deduced that Kiddo#3 believes “a hairy-hairy” means “someone with bushy, tangled hair;” I’ve also deduced that Kiddo#2 believes it an insult graver than “ye scurvy dogs” and “your mother wears combat boots.” There has been much teasing about who looks like “a hairy-hairy.”

Curious, at one point I told Kiddo#3 that he looked like a hairy-hairy, and he screamed insulted protests. And so the insult marches on: Kiddo#3 is guaranteed to get a rise out of anyone by saying “he wook wike a hairy-hairy.”

But it’s not only people, I’ve discovered. When I bought a new spider plant to replace the old dead spider plant with only two leaves, Kiddo#3 stared at the enormous, rioting leaves of the new plant and exclaimed, “It look like a hairy-hairy!”

I thought it was funny. Until the day it crept into our vocabulary.

My Patient Husband frowned as he stared out the window. “I need to mow the lawn. It look like a hairy-hairy.”

Or me, regarding the neighbors’ forsythias: “That bush look like a hairy-hairy.”

I googled “hairy-hairy” and based on the results, I can tell you the following:

1. There does not appear to be a character in a children’s book or show called a “hairy-hairy”
2. If you google “hairy-hairy,” you will obtain results that make you want to retch, and google will ask if you email your mother with that keyboard.

If anyone knows where Kiddo#3 got the term “hairy-hairy,” please let me know.  Right now, I have only one crazy theory.

In the past few months, several radio stations have shifted George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” into high rotation. I don’t like the song that much, but I let it play. At the end, when George Harrison is singing all the different names, one of them is “Hare Hare.” I think Kiddo#3 heard that and parsed it to the closest English he could.

That’s a stretch, but my kids have made weirder leaps of logic, and very little escapes Kiddo#3’s notice. Including whether you’ve brushed your hair yet today. 

Until next time, keep the lawn mowed, and remember, brothers don’t let sisters be hairy-hairy.