How To Tell A Klotz From A Glotz

Adding a second child, even a healthy one like my lovely and robust Ivy, to the Core Team has ensured that we’ve been seeing lots of doctors. I didn’t realize how many we’d visited in the last three months until Mason told Sara yesterday that he wanted to “co-pay some money.”
My adorable, adventurous, and highly intelligent son, Mason actually listed the three doctors he knows recently: Dr. Chen, Dr. Brand, and Dr. Seuss. The first is the obstetrician who delivered Mason and Ivy both, the second is his own pediatrician, and the third, well he needs no introduction! Mason loves Dr. Seuss books as much as I do. Though they all have their charms, only some of them, such as the Cat in the Hat, hold up to repeated reads; others, like the stultifying simplistic Hop on Pop, do not. The ones with tongue-twisters are particularly fun, as one has to actually pay attention to the task of enunciation.

Reading the good doctor’s works as closely as I do has definitely caused me to wonder whether Seuss was a bird watcher. Some of his verse directly references birds and even bird watching. But what really persuades me is this nonsensical poem from the lingually-challenging Oh Say Can You Say that channels the madness of attempting to differentiate between two nearly identical species, something that strikes me as exceedingly apropos for the readers of this site:

How To Tell A Klotz From A Glotz

Well, the Glotz, you will notice,
has lots of black spots.
The Klotz is quite different
with lots of black dots.
But the big problem is
that the spots on a Glotz
are about the same size
as the dots on a Klotz.
So you first have to spot
who the one with the dots is.
Then it’s easy to tell
who the Klotz or the Glotz is.