I Wish There Was No Such Thing As Fish.

Calvin can't pronounce "f" very well. It comes out sounding like "b". He also has a hard time saying the "sh" sound, it sounds more like "ch". So having a conversation about fish with him is extremely painful, as you can imagine. The conversations usually consist of him excitedly telling me all he knows about the fish we are looking at, their color, what they are doing, etc. And the only responses he gets from me are the correct pronunciation of the word, and it becoming more and more emphatic as the conversation progresses.

The pain only increases in more public settings. I just want to shoot myself when we take him to the aquarium at the zoo. Maybe the shocked glances I get from people sitting nearby are just figments of my imagination, I tell myself. Maybe they realize, having children of their own perhaps, that it is just a mispronunciation. None of this lessens the pain as I try, unsuccessfully, to get my son to talk of something else while in front of a vast aquarium full of "biches".