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Monday, January 29, 2007

Heard Around the House

Sam is studying the Ten Commandments. He was reading out of one the St. Joseph picture books about the ninth commandment. He read this out loud (slight paraphrase, but the bold is word for word):

When you find your self thinking impure thoughts or thinking of committing an impure act, you should get busy...

Now of course what follows is get busy with some kind of work or prayer to move your mind away from such thoughts or actions. However, as Sam read aloud, all Lilly heard was "get busy" which according to her means "have children" so she found the context hysterically funny. Even funnier to me is that my dear sweet innocent daughter hasn't the first clue what "get busy" really means. To her it really is some sort of strange, nebulous way of saying you should get married and start a family. In which case, she's not that far off the mark.

The ninth commandment like the sixth can be tricky to teach an 8 year old boy and preserve innocence. I think I managed pretty well as he understands the idea of having privacy when changing his clothes and taking a bath. I mentioned gently the concept of keeping the areas covered by a bathing suit especially private and that he should never touch girls in those areas. I also said he should generally not go around kissing other little girls that are not family (greeting each other with a kiss is the norm in my family). To which he said, "Unless I ask them first."

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