The Big Daddy Potato

This past week we have been reading a grade school text book that we borrowed from a teacher friend at church. As excited as we were, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The first story began with a boy playing on a dining room chair while his dog watched. Over the table stood a ‘big daddy potato’ which had recently been ‘given to grow.’ When the boy decided to swing on the chairs, the big daddy potato shook it’s head at him. Ignoring the potato’s warning, the boy swung on the chair and consequently broke his father’s cup.
We were thoroughly confused until Jason went to class and found out that the word we had been reading as potato (картошка) was really an old way to say photograph (карточка). So it turns out that, hanging over the table, was a recently enlarged photo of his father! Needless to say, the story made much more sense once we got the vocabulary correct. :o)