Angie and I have survived 4 children. That breaks down to 30 years, 2 months and 27 days. We have been doing the “Happy Dance” four over 7 years now and we only have to deal with grandchildren now and they are a whole different set of stories and another future post that is yet to be written.
When our first child, Marisa, was 3 years old we were attending a district convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in Reno, Nevada. I was standing in line at lunch time to get some food and was holding my little daughter in my arms. As all little children at that age she was always asking
“Daddy, what’s that?”
So when the familiar question came out I casually looked around to see what had caught her interest. To my horror I saw that she was pointing to the black man standing in line behind us. He had an amused look on his face and I could tell by his slight smile and beaming eyes he was anxious to see how I was going to answer my little girl. I apologized to the man and explained that while we did live in Idaho, we were not the foaming at the mouth racist types. It was just that he was the first black man she had ever seen. He quickly broke into a big grin and extended the bare skin on the back of his hand to my daughter and said
“Its real honey, see? It won’t rub off.”
She tentatively extended her little hand out and gave the back of his hand a vigorous rub then looked at her fingers with amazement.
”Wow!” she exclaimed while holding out her little pink fingers to me “he’s right daddy, Look!”
Marisa’s curiosity continued to be a source of delight in our home. One year, when she was about 9 years old, we had a friend named Bubba who was a painter. We had hired him to paint our home and Marisa was watching him as he was working on the garage wall in the backyard. You could best get an idea of what Bubba looked like if you imagined and old Hell’s Angel biker with a fondness for beer, lot’s and lot’s of beer. Let’s just say that Bubba hasn’t seen his feet for a while. Due to Bubba’s large overhang I don’t think he was able to maneuver a belt through his pant loops as, on this day, it was painfully made clear. Marisa called out to her mother
“Hey Mommy, what is that big line going up Bubba’s back?”
Ashley, our third child, was also very inquisitive. She had an older woman that she called on in our family ministry. Being Jehovah’s Witnesses, our entire family participates in the door to door ministry that Witnesses are so well known for. After several months of calling on this woman Ashley went to the door as usual with one of her siblings and came back to inform us that the nice lady was ill and away at the doctor’s.
“Oh,” her mother asked “did her husband tell you what was wrong with her?”
“I don’t know” she replied “he said that there was something wrong with her eyes.”
Her mother continued the questioning out of concern for the poor woman. “Do you remember what he called it?” she asked Ashley.
“It started with the letter G “she said “Oh yeah, I remember! Gonorrhea!”
It seems that the age of three is the most curious age as my youngest son, Tristan, proved to us during a visit to Disneyland with my brother and his wife, Tammy. We were standing in one of the stores when Tammy noticed Tristan leaning down from his stroller trying to look up her shorts.
“What are you doing Tristan?” she asked him.
“Just trying to look up your shorts Aunt Tammy” he casually replied. She looked at me and I just shrugged and kept walking. We learned not long after that to not let him near the mannequins in the dress shops either. To our relief he grew out of that stage quickly.
The most famous question asked by our children at that wonderful age of three came from our second child, Benjamin. We were again at Disneyland with another couple, Paul and Michelle, who did not yet know the joys of having children. Our hotel rooms were connecting and they offered to have the kids sleep over in their room to give us a night of privacy. We, of course, thought that was a great idea as were not even sure how to spell that word anymore, let alone actually have it. About fifteen minutes later there was a polite knock on the adjoining doors. When I answered it Michelle was standing there with a big grin on her face and tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry to disturb you two,” she whispered “but I just had to share with you what your son just said to me”.
Thoughts of all the skeletons in the family closet running amuck and making a mass escape flooded my mind.
“Oh,” I replied with great dread, “what did Ben say?”
“Well,” Michelle continued happily, “I was taking him to the bathroom to go pee and he pointed to his little wee wee and asked me if I knew what that was? Before I could think of an appropriate answer he informed me rather proudly
““This is my penis! Do you like it?” ”
I told him it was very nice and he replied
““Yep! And one day it’s going to be big, like my daddy’s!””
The only justice in this world I have found is that your children will one day have children of their own. Then they too can experience all the joy and embarrassment that our children gave to us.
Benjamin is our first and so far only offspring to procreate. His first son’s name is Hayden. Ben related an experience that he had in the shower with the boy at the age of two. Ben said that Hayden had a plastic cup that he was playing with and Ben noticed that he would quickly fill it up and giggle madly as he poured it out all over his head. At first he didn’t pay any attention to him until he starting thinking
“How is he filling his cup up so fast?”
When he stopped to really observe his son he found that Hayden was using the nearest outcropping on his father’s body that happened to be conveniently eye level with him and was filling his cup from the water running off of it. Needless to say he quickly put an end to the “fill the cup from daddy’s downspout game”.
God is good, yes he is very, very good.