Kids and god are so interesting aren’t they? Especially if you don’t belong to any formalized religion, and they are allowed to discover ‘god’ on their own.
My mother teaches my son a few things. Sometimes they do the 'as I lie me down to sleep" prayer before bed. But that started only fairly recently.
I ask my son (just turned 4) about god and he says god is all black ( I ask, black skin, or black clothes? he says both. Which is interesting since we live in a very un-cultured part of oregon where there are virtually NO african-americans.) He says god’s eyes are green, or maybe brown. God’s hair is black, or maybe he doesn’t have any anymore. God does NOT have a moustache or beard. God rides a motorcycle and before my son was born god took him for a ride to some kind of department store that I don’t seem to understand about since I can’t remember before I was born. On the way to the department store they had to go by a place where they fought giant snakes in a cave with their swords.
2 of the more interesting things my son has stated about god are that
If you are a boy then god is a boy (man). IF you are a girl then god is a girl (woman). I found this out by asking my son if god was a woman or a man. He looked at me like I was a complete idiot and had asked him, for example, if people breathe air or if people breathe mashed potatoes. His answer; “God is a boy because I AM a boy.” I then extrapolated…“Is my god a girl?” Again he gave me the “you are so dense, mom” look and answered simply “yeah”.
my son believes that god taught him how to talk. Which, when I started to think about it, makes sense. I mean, no human really taught him how to talk. He learned by watching/hearing us speak, but the innate ability to aquire language was already his.
I think we were talking about how babies can’t talk, and about how he didn’t used to be able to talk. and he said something like “I used to only cry but then god taught me how to talk.”
“Can you drive me and Carolyn and Angela to the Mall? Pleeeeeze?” or
“Can we stop at McDonalds’s? Pleeeeze?”
Other than that, she doesn’t ask questions because she knows everything. She has known everything since she was three and, after studying my face intently in what I misguidedly thought was loving contemplation, delivered herself of the following conclusion:
“People which are big don’t got so much cute on their faces.”
My 12-year-old son and I were at the They Might Be Giants concert recently. Their opening act – a guy with a guitar – announced the title of his last song: “I’m in Love with a Diesel Dyke.”
To which, my son piped up: “Dad, what’s a diesel dyke?”
“A lesbian,” I said to him softly. There was a couple sitting next to me, one of whom would met the definition admirably, but I don’t think she would have been amused if, instead, I had said, “her.”
Okay, I don’t have kids of my own, just by proxy. But…my students can come up with some pretty amusing and/or stunning questions of their own. When you add the factor of their second language status, you get even more.
A few years ago, when I still taught third grade, one of my students asked sweetly,
“How many As do I need to get married?”
After various attempts at clarifying, I finally figured out what she meant–how many As did she need for (honor certificate of) Merit.
This is not a question, but it was an amusing paragraph I read in a student’s essay last year. They were to write an explanatory, how-to essay, and one of my strongest writers chose to write about how to care for a dog. She had an entire paragraph about “How to put your doggy to sleepy,” and she did a beautiful job in the writing and paragraph structure, right down to the concluding statement:
“In conclusion, if you love your doggy as much as I know I do, you’ll learn how to put him to sleep like this.”
The more modern version of this could be:
" I bought you on line on Ebay."
We are not church goers here. The bible is not something I really get into. But I do have a very cute picture on my son’s wall of Noah & his ark. ( Its a framed greeting card)
Just the other day as I read him his nightly story, my son looked at it and said, " Mama, what is that wizard doing with the animals."
I thought that was so cute.
***And yet another couple of penis stories ***
One friend and his 4 year old son were in a public bathroom both using a urinal. Another man comes up to use the one next to the boy. The boy looks at the man standing there, then at his own equipment, then at his Dad’s tackle and announces, " Daddy, your penis is bigger than that guys."
Another friend’s five year old boy was in a public restroom with his grandfather and the boy was standing there with his equipment in hand and nothing was happening. The grandfather asked if eveyrthing was alright/do you need help/etc. the boy shook his head, looked down on his tackle and said very firmly,
“Penis do your thing!”
