our little reverse racist

Sometimes things at home are funny and then you go out in public and realize they are embarrassing. Ben likes to call people cracker head and chocolate face when they are eating crackers or have chocolate on their faces, respectively. There are lots of other terms he uses as well. He also calls them this when he is trying to be silly and he has made lots of friends at school because other kids think he is full of hilarious jokes. So we were at the park the other day and he met two new friends and they were playing hide and seek. When I told him we had to leave, they said, "Bye, Ben-ten-igan." They were trying to be silly, referencing a popular cartoon. Ben normally would have gotten angry and said, "I'm just Ben" but with his new silly phase, he tried to throw it back at them. "Bye, Cracker Heads," he yelled across the park. Sometimes it's difficult to understand what Ben is saying. In this case, it wasn't. Everyone turned to look at us. I quickly told Ben there would be no more Cracker Head references, that sometimes people thought cracker was a bad word. "But crackers are what you eat," he told me. "Yes they are," I replied. "Only talk about them when you are eating." Later, Ryan told me that the chocolate face reference should probably go too, that it could be misinterpreted. I hadn't ever thought of it that way, and I burst out laughing.