This month, Reese’s favorite thing is peanut butter. She wants it on everything. Anything we have ever given to her with peanut butter on it, she now refuses to eat plain. I get where she’s coming from.

Being 16 months old and all, she can’t say “peanut butter” yet, so she has shortened it (she’s her mother’s daughter) to a simple, yet unbecoming, “pean.”

She asks for it 24/7, and always with a hint of frenzied panic in her voice, as if she’s anticipating NOT getting pean and is warning us of what will happen if she doesn’t.

All. Day. Long.

The word has become such a part of our everyday language that we forget it doesn’t carry the best connotations. These are what a lot of the conversations in our world sound like.

“No pean”

“Do you want some more pean?”

“We’re not having pean right now”

“Ok, we’ll get you your pean”

“No more pean today”

“Pean’s all gone”

“They don’t have pean here”

I know I’m a grown up now and words like “pean” probably shouldn’t make me laugh anymore, but they do, ok? Sometimes I wonder what other people think when we are out in the world and my daughter is furiously throwing her rice cakes on the floor, screaming for “peeeaaannnnn” as I dig through my diaper bag for the full-sized jar of Jif that now lives there.

Hopefully, they just think it’s funny. Because it is. It’s hilarious.