You say bidet...

I say, how the heck do you spell that?

Obviously, I found out, but that is a story all to itself. And so I saved this picture of my models.

The boys' bathroom features both a toilet and bidet, or as they would believe, a toilet and urinal, one for each of them or one for whichever business they were doing. They were so excited to be able to both use the bathroom at the same time. Imagine my surprise, and theirs, when I found them both trying out the equipment, each of them positioned at a different station. And then imagine Jacob's surprise when he tried to "flush" his "urinal" and instead was sprayed with water in his face. If only I'd had my camera with me.

I obviously just had to share this story of how my country bumpkins thought they had their very own urinal at home. Which then obviously led to my need to spell the word bidet.

So I did what any internet loving American would do. I googled it. Except that suddenly, my Google homepage was no longer in English. It was as if my computer thought it had been sold south, and even though every other time I had relied upon its wealth of knowledge in English, now it must perform solamente en Español.

As most of you know, my Spanish is not great, mostly because I'm an online Spanish dropout who's desperately trying to remember Spanish from college, which is fine as long as I can supplement my limited vocabulary with English as needed. This does not work with Google.

Google had failed me, so I turned to my other go-to source-- Dictionary.com. The only problem with that was that I had no idea how to spell bidet so all my searches were again in vain.

"Okay," I thought. "Bidet is French. I'll just call one of my friends that's fluent in French." So I did. I called two friends and got two different voice mail messages. My native French friend is in Togo with an unreliable internet connection and therefore useless Vonage phone. And my other fluent in French friend in Guadalajara, Mexico, just didn't answer. How rude.

What was a grammar/spelling perfectionist to do?

In a moment of desperation to find the correct spelling of bidet, I sent this email to my friend in Guadalajara. (I assumed the Togo friend wouldn't get my email for at least 4 hours, and this was a very urgent problem. It just couldn't wait any longer.)

So, I've been trying to reach you by phone with no success. I hope this doesn't mean you've lost internet or worse, electricity-- again. I have a very important question. How the heck do you spell b'day. Not the abbreviation for birthday. But the extra toiletry thingy in our bathroom. You know, the one the boys think is a urinal. I tried to google it, but google is in Spanish. I tried to look it up on dictionary.com but I don't know how to spell it, so that doesn't help. Can you help? I think it's French, and you speak French so you should be a good resource, right? If only I could reach you. Can't call N since her phone/internet situation is even more pathetic than yours. Please help a perfectionist who desperately needs to blog about a b'day or boudeaux or whatever the heck it is....

But she didn't respond fast enough either. So I returned to my computer, determined to find the answer. This time I tried typing google.com into my browser instead of just going to my homepage. And lo and behold, it was a Christmas miracle. There at the bottom of the screen was a button that said "Google in English." So I clicked it and one minute later, I had my answer.

And now all is right with the world again, at least spelling wise. But now for the most important question: how do you use a bidet?