Simply Mother

I am delighted that our family is getting old enough to have absolutely hilarious conversations. Oh, it is wonderful, and I can only imagine it will become more and more so as our children pass through different developmental stages.

I wish I could remember all these gems so I could record them, and I especially wish I had the ability to convey the incredibly serious and innocent tones in which my children voice the hilarity, but if you could have been a fly on our wall tonight, here’s just a small glimpse of what you might have heard.

[Preface: We are in Texas. As such, my husband believes we must take every opportunity to make sure our children mesh with the Southern culture. Specifically, the dialect. Note: There are no typos in this dialogue. Matt's my husband, Jade is 3, Sarah is 6.]

Matt: Jade, can I aks you a question?

Jade: Let me think about that for a minute.

Matt: Do you know what aks means?

Jade: [still making it very apparent that she is thinking]

Sarah: I don’t think thinking is going to help you much.

At this point, you may be assuming Sarah was being rude, but you’ll have to trust me that her tone conveyed a very factual demeanor, and her following remark makes it even clearer that she was not making a criticism of her sister’s intelligence.

“You see,” she explained, “an ax is something used to cut trees, and I don’t think you’ve heard of that before.”

. . . Hence, thinking really won’t do you any good. Boy Golly, dinner time sure is a hoot. I do so enjoy my family!

–

Now, I promise, really, I am going to write a post about that whole homeschooling thing.

I need to desperately, because, as I’m sure you’re aware if you read this blog with any frequency, I have to write about something to really get clear on it, and, while the way things are going feels really, really good and right for all of us, I don’t really have the appropriate words to explain what it is we’re doing. This leads to me sounding like an idiot whenever I try to give a short explanation about why and how we homeschool.

Not only do I come away feeling utterly ridiculous, I’m pretty sure they go away wondering whether they maybe shouldn’t call social services for me. Did she really just say she doesn’t structure her children’s learning? Does she want to raise total morons?

Plus, we’ve got Jade speaking up for us, whenever anyone asks if Sarah’s in school. “We don’t do school.”

Which Matt likes to follow up with a wry, “We don’t believe in education.”

But we DO highly value education–we just maybe have some different ideas about how it is best attained.

Filed in: cuteness • family | September 17, 2009