Rehabilitation

As the father of two daughters, I do what I can to keep them from being unduly burdened by the troubles of a fallen world. But in this media-saturated world we live in, this is nearly impossible.

Yesterday was Wednesday, which around here means one thing: afterschool Scrabble Club. It’s a middle school club, but Elise likes to come even though she is only in fifth grade.

I had a rack with nothing but consonants, but I managed to find a spot for “rehab.” Rehab –of course- is short for “rehabilitation” so I wasn’t 100% sure "rehab" would be acceptable as a stand-alone word.

Because I’m an English teacher and my daughter is eleven, when Elise and I play Scrabble together, I will frequently self-challenge which means that if I am unsure whether a word I played is legit, I will challenge it. If it’s not a word, I will pull it from the board and skip a turn.

I said to Elise “If ‘rehab’ is in the dictionary, it means to fix up a house or to make repairs.” Well, that’s what I meant to say. But between reaching for the dictionary and trying to figure out if “rehab” would be before or after “reiterate” in the dictionary, my comment kind of came out one word at a time and not very coherently.

As a result, Elise beat me to the punch, “I know. Rehab. Like Demi Lovato.”

Demi Lovato is the teen singer/songwriter and former star of the Disney show “Sonny with a Chance.” Ms. Lovato got her big break as one of the kids on the Barney show. Last November, Demi Lovato entered rehab for unspecified reasons.Yeah, sweetie. Rehab. Like that.

In a perfect world, an eleven-year-old wouldn’t need to know what “rehab” means. Unless of course, she was helping her daddy remodel the upstairs bathroom.By the way, I looked it up in the Official Scrabble Dictionary: it’s an acceptable play.

The definition it gives?

To remodel.