My younger son, when he was around fifteen months old, would say if an accident that needed my attention had occurred, “Uh oh. Uh oh.”  He would just keep saying that over and over until I could take care of the problem.  I always thought that was very cute.

One night when I was sitting at the kitchen table with his older brother, who was about five at the time, Michael, who had been in the den playing, came into the kitchen and said, “Uh oh.  Uh oh.  Uh oh.”  I didn’t address him right away because I was helping David with some of his kindergarten homework.  Finally, I said, “What is it, Baby?”  He just shrugged his little shoulders and said, “I put the ice in the take.”  Now, David and I knew that Michael called dice, “ice.”  And he also referred to the VCR as the “take.”  So, we knew right away what he was talking about.  He had put some dice in the VCR.  We all headed into the den to verify what he had done, and sure enough, when I pushed the little door on the VCR back, I could just barely see the top of the dice sticking up.  Again, Michael started his chorus of, “Uh oh. Uh oh,” following me back to my bedroom to get my tweezers.  Fortunately, I got the dice out easily. 

After that, every time Michael would approach me with his “uh oh” routine, David would ask, “Did you put the ice in the take?”  That cute little phrase became the family code for anything that had not turned out so well.  It still makes me smile to think of it all these years later.