I have no idea what Mark is typing, but he looks up from his phone, his brows knitted in confusion. “How do you spell wool?”

No one answers him, and so he tries again, speaking mostly to himself this time. “Wool … why doesn’t my phone understand what I’m trying to type?” He pokes a finger at the phone’s screen. “W … H …”

I glance over at him. “Really, Mark?”

He looks up sheepishly. “So how do you spell it?”

“O … O … L.”

He types and then stares intently at his screen. “HA! You don’t know how to spell it either. My phone says that’s wrong.”

“What did you type, exactly?”

“W … H … O … O … L.”

Kallan, who has been silent until now, shrieks with laughter as I explain, “Babe, there’s no H. W-O-O-L … no H.”

He stabs the correction into his phone. “That’s not what you said the first time.”

There is another shriek of laughter from Kallan. “Oh my god, Daddy … whool?  Really? That is the funniest thing I have ever heard!” Kallan tries out the word a few more times, quickly bastardizing the pronunciation to exaggerate the mistake. “Whool … wahowl …wahool … wuhool …wuhHOOL.” She leaps from her chair and stalks around the kitchen as though she is a supermodel, pausing dramatically at the end of the catwalk to toss her hair and stare at us over one shoulder. “What am I wearing? Nothing but wuhHOOL.”

Mark refuses to look up from his phone. “People make mistakes.”

After a few more trips down the runway, each time ending with a doe-eyed, “What am I wearing? Nothing but wuhHOOL,” Kallan transforms herself into her father, doing a pretty excellent imitation of his slouchy walk and then stopping short confusedly as an invisible someone demands answers. “What am I wearing? Hold on, let me check.” Kallan as Mark pulls awkwardly at the collar of her shirt to squint at the label. “Why, I believe it’s wuhHOOL.”

Color rises in Mark’s cheeks as I sink against the kitchen counter, weeping with laughter. He glares at me, flustered and embarrassed, and he mutters, “Why does this family have to make such a big deal out of every little mistake?”

Kallan as Mark is asked by invisible strangers again and again what his/her various garments are fashioned from, and again and again, Kallan as Mark reaches awkwardly for the tags of his/her clothing. She pulls the back of her underwear up and around, craning to read the label before announcing (in her best authoritative Dad-voice), “Why, it’s wuhHOOL … of course.”

Mark sighs as Kallan continues. “WuhHOOL for the underwin!”

I swipe at tears as I giggle helplessly.

Kallan then becomes a saleswoman offering Mark and me an imaginary scarf, urging us to run our hands over the softness. “It’s made of the finest wuhHOOL from the rarest of wuhHOOLEN sheep. Caress the wuhHOOL and feel the wuhHOOLEN wonder.” She turns as if to search beneath a counter. “Or perhaps you would be interested in some wuhHOOLEN socks. Socks made of wuhHOOL, and you’ll be the envy of the socken world. People will ask What has put the bounce in Mark’s step? What has given him that air of superiority where his feet are concerned? And you will say …” and here Kallan rests a saleswoman hand of faux-intimacy on Mark’s arm, “… and you will say My feet are enrobed in wuhHOOL and life is very good indeed.”

Mark pulls his arm out of the conversation. “W-O-O-L … I get it. You are insane. I blame your mother …” and he gestures with a hand to indicate the entirety of Kallan, who is still a saleswoman, her lips pursed in slight customer-service annoyance as he finishes his sentence, “… for all of this.”

She sniffs the air of lesser beings and informs him, still as saleswoman, “Not everyone is worthy of wuhHOOL. My mistake.”

From behind her book, where she has been ignoring all of us, Maj changes the subject. “Why is the Christmas wreath hanging next to the front door instead of on the front door?”

Before I can even gather the words to explain, Kallan has raced to the front door to examine the wreath and then wailed her way hysterically back into the room. “WHY CAN’T THIS FAMILY EVER BE NORMAL? NORMAL FAMILIES PUT THE WREATH ON THE FRONT DOOR NOT OFF TO THE SIDE! WHY ISN’T OUR WREATH ON THE DOOR LIKE NORMAL FAMILIES PUT THEIR WREATHS? WHY CAN’T WE BE NORMAL?”

We stare at her, and Maj says mildly as she flips a page in her book, “Yeah, because wreath placement is the thing that keeps us from being a normal family. Holiday décor has always been our stumbling block.”

Sometimes I laugh so hard, I cannot breathe.