If you are a linguist, your child will most likely be a linguist. I mean, by birth.  I am convinced of that more and more with personal evidence.

Joke: as if you were a parent to parent parents
Date: November 20, 2006
When lacking sleep, which happens a lot in the high schools of the valley, my daughter Tanya simply cannot stop complaining or giving lectures.  She complained again for nothing, first to her Mom and then to me.  So I told her to stop:  

"As if you were a parent to parent parents!"

She instantly replied, "I can parent parents if I am Grand-parent" Tanya always enjoys this type of word games.

"Yes, but you are not."

"Well, I MAY parent parents if I pretend to be Grand-parent."

"That's called pseudo-parenting"

"What is pseudo-parenting?"

"Pseudo-parenting is parenting when you fake a parent."

"You got me, Dad." she smiled. As a result, she stopped "parenting".

Not a Joke: the internal beauty is tissue-deep
Date: 2013-10-16
So I showed some parse trees in my blog titled "The beauty of Grammar Trees" and got some positive responses, one said: "Wow, if fully automated, the drawing is really beautiful".
"Drawing?", I said to myself, "that beauty is only skin-deep."   As a linguist, I have a bad habit of speaking out anything of my thought, mostly to myself.
Obviously this time Tanya was around and heard me, without knowing exactly what I was referring to, she immediately echoed, as if we had been in a philosophy dialogue on parsing:
"Yes. But the internal beauty is tissue-deep."


Childhood story: a little flattering goes a long way
Date: September 30, 2006
"Dad, there is a boy who is really annoying. He keeps saying I am beautiful and, yu-o...., he even begs me to be his girl-friend, yu-o.... "
Tanya seemed to be really annoyed when telling me this.  I had nothing to say.
A couple of minutes later, she continued,
"Dad, he is not bad.  
In fact, he is pretty nice.  
After all, a little flattering goes a long way. "
My turn to confirm this universal truth: "yes, this is absolutely universally true： a little flattering goes a long way. "

Childhood story: spontaneous commercials
Date: Winter, 2003

These are the commercials Tanya made on the spot, caught on tape in 2003：

https://youtu.be/y7Q1vtwpixI 


“Hello, People. Check on this flashlight. It's so cool you don't need to buy another flashlight. It's tripple A batteries, but you can twist it around for other...for pictures. It's for kids only. Bye-bye. After this commercial, you won't need anything else but this flashlight!”

“Hello, everybody. You don't need to go to a shopping mall. For your garage, you call 1-800-999-8888, you can let somebody fill your garage in-to a store. You don't have to go to store any more. They will put everything inside it, everything from every store. You don't have to see 'Sold out', 'Sold out', 'Sold out'.”