Bedtime prayers

I was nursing our little ADD baby upstairs while BC and Daddy read their bedtime story and prayed their prayers down in the basement by the Christmas tree, the lights of which cause the little man to forget entirely what he's supposed to be doing, i.e. nursing. I heard BC climbing the stairs and saying to her Daddy, "May I teach him prayers?" He said she could.

She then came barreling into the living room and rattled off, rapid fire, the Lord's Prayer, the Nunc Dimittis, a Hail Mary, the Apostle's Creed and the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. There were very few stumbles, and all were delivered in an attitude of true earnestness. I told her just how proud I was and gave her a big hug.

Then Daddy took her to change her diaper and began teaching her Christ's Greater and Lesser Commandments. She could not wait to get in to the living room to teach her brother. She was a bit shaky herself, but she took her job of teaching them to him with utter seriousness.

Quite the big sister, I'd say!

Hobbits and Misfits

Daddy is finishing up The Hobbit with BC, who is thoroughly enjoying it. When I had her brother at the doctor's office today for a hideous cough and an ear infection, she and her daddy sat down to read "a little bit." Twenty-five pages later, they were mere pages from the end. She didn't want him to stop reading! But she was listening pretty intently.

During the last battle, when Bilbo is injured but has forgotten to take off his ring and no one who is hearing his cries can find him, Daddy said to BC, "Why can't people find Bilbo?"

"Because he's invisible!"

"That's right! Why is he invisible?"

"Because he's wearing his ring!"

***

Later this evening, we had one of those moments you want just to bottle so you can either laugh your tail off 3 years from now or relive them and cry.

BC was watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with her daddy while I put her brother to bed. I came back to the basement where they were and she was sobbing. Absolutely sobbing. Shnuffling and crying and whimpering. I said, "What in the world happened?"

"She's crying about Rudolph," said her dad. "She feels really sorry for him."

I was gobsmacked. That had never occurred to me. In fact, I think I would've been mocked soundly if I had reacted that way as a kid.

But sure enough: When Clarice is scolded by her father for hanging about with "red-nosed reindeer," BC began to cry outright and said, "Poor Rudolph!"

My child has ten times the empathy I have. 


I will say, however, that at the end of the movie when Daddy said that he would read her A Christmas Carol on the basement couch tonight instead of in the living room, she announced, "Ok. You go upstairs and get A Christmas Carol while I stay here." Sir, yes, sir. 

Last night we attended a ceremony for my grandfather's portrait hanging at the Medina County Court of Common Pleas. It was a lovely event. Grandpa's law partner, Bob Bux, presented the portrait with some lovely words. At one point, he retold the story of Grandpa's showing up in his office and reciting, from memory, Kublai Khan, which he correctly identified as a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. BC, who was sitting on the table of the grand jury room facing her grandpa (my dad), immediately perked up and said, "He wrote Rime of the Ancient Mariner!"

She then went on to enjoy rather a large meal with her grandpa at an Italian restaurant, where they enjoyed lasagne and spumoni, two of BC's favorites.

This morning, BC has been up to her usual tricks, and has kept me hopping. She's had a head cold. I could hear her froggy little voice in her room when she woke up, saying, "Mom? Mommy? Are you there?" And then, poor thing, she started coughing. So I trotted into her room to get her up and get her moving, and she announced, "I was choking like a bat."

I was ignorant of bats' tendencies to choke.

So we changed pants, had some cuddles and then headed into the house for the day. But her brother was being naughty. Her solution was to move in, Commando style, and fix the problem. I hauled her off of him and explained that she was not in charge. "If he is doing something he's not supposed to be doing, you let Mommy discipline him."

He kept being naughty. There was a pause.

"Mommy, will you discipline him please?"

I was talking to my mom on the phone at the time and told her what BC had said. Then I heard her pipe up: "But you're not disciplining him!"