Table Talk

Some kids tend to say strange things in the car. Mom is driving along, minding her own business and from the back seat, the child say something funny or clever and the poor woman has to remember it until she's parked the car and can write it down.

I'm glad that doesn't happen to me, because I never keep paper in the car. The Keip boys tend to speak up at the kitchen table. In the drawer behind my chair, with the napkins, I have a pen and a bunch of old Christian's Daily calendar pages. So when they blurt something out, I quietly grab one and write what they said.

Some of these quotes made me think I should restrict their access to Calvin & Hobbes and Thomas the Tank Engine for a while.

J: "Don't mess around with me. I'm on official business."

I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like Gordon to me. The following from R sound a lot like Calvin.

R: "Mom, in college did you learn how to make a hand grenade?"

A while back, I had a mealtime conversation with R about his career plans.

R: "I want to let all the people in the neighborhood know I'm a Secret Finder."
Me: "So...if someone doesn't know, something, they call you?"
R:"If nobody knows something, or if they've lost a million dollars or a couple diamonds or something, they call me in and I look around their home."

Then there's bickering and trash talk, which we try to keep to a minimum. Recently, R made a comment that J found silly, so J made a little disgusted sound. R replied, "I'm older than you, so why should you snort? I'm smarter and more efficient."

(What R doesn't understand is that in a few years, when he says that sort of thing, J may stop ignoring the gauntlet on the drawbridge, the glove on the ice - pick your favorite metaphor.)

My final category is the philosophical/spiritual. For example,

R: "Is this the only Earth in the Universe?"

R: "Do babies grow up in heaven?"

R: "If Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, would we be able to jump off a mountain and fall into a ravine and not get hurt?"