Chot Tub Time Machine

It seems to me that a fair barometer of closeness is how many short-hand references and inside jokes you share.  When my father turned 80 last year we made a loooong list of Dad-isms, most of them things that he had only said in earnest once but that had become family classics and, as such, had been repeated often throughout the years.

In our senior yearbook, my BFF and I jammed a long list of one liners and quotes on our ad page just to remind us of all the fun (and not so fun) times we had shared and things we had done. Sadly, though our friendship is still strong and we are still (overly?) self-referential, time has warped our memories of how some of our little sayings came to be.  We know that they are funny, we just can't always remember why.

Which is why I am going to record here for my future self how my kids and I came to call the thing that sits near the pool bubbling full of hot water the "Chot Tub."

Every school day, my son has Chobani's version of a GoGurt-- yogurt in a tube-- for his mid-morning snack.  Each tube has a rebus puzzle that my son's classmates vie to solve (my son checks out the puzzle at home).  One day last fall, this was the puzzle:

The boys at his table were stumped. (??!)  Finally, one of the boys shouted out-- triumphantly-- "READING IS CHOT TUB!!"

To which another boy responded disdainfully, "There's no 'p' in hot tub."

And, we hope, none in the 'ool either.