"Mommy, I love you as much as the time it took God to make the whole world, which was actually very short, so I love you as much as the world is big."

Ouch

We've been reading stories about Jesus recently, including his miracles.
While I was laying in bed with a fever, Faelan jumped around the bed and landed on my neck. After howling, I said, "If I'm lucky I won't be paralyzed."
He said, "Will you be cured by the healing power of Jesus?"

New and exciting ways to use words

As Jeremy and Faelan and I were riding in the car one day in mid-August, Faelan started using "Jesus" as a swear word: "Bad! Bad! Jesus! Bad!"

He had learned that from a woman on the playground who said it when he fell off the fire pole. Her son had started to say it after she did, and she yelled at him for it, without even seeming to realize that she'd just said it herself.

Anyway, when I told him he shouldn't use God's name that way, he wanted to know why, and I said something about God telling us not to. He said, "God is just in imagination, he can't talk to us." I said that he was real, and that he left us instructions in the Bible.

Faelan said, what about that woman with the baby, and I asked, "who, Mary?" and he said "Yes! Mary! Mary! Bad!" So then I had to explain why he shouldn't use her name as a swear word.

He wanted to know if she left us instructions not to. "No," I said, "she wasn't God, so she didn't give us instructions. She gave her own children instructions." He wanted to know why, and I tried to explain that that was her job as a mother.

He thought for a minute, and then he asked, "who was the father?" Like a goof, I said, "you mean Joseph?" And he said, "Joseph! Joseph! Bad!" at which point Jeremy and I cracked up.

I'd never heard anyone use those names as swear words separately before. How long did it take the Irish to combine them? It sure didn't take Faelan long to go from one to all three. Happily, he has not done it again.

Songs

I learned a new hymn this morning, from Bible Study Fellowship's preschool booklet. I asked Faelan if he wanted to sing it with me, but he said "I have a song in my head that I just made up that I want to sing." Here it is:

The lord is come dead
He climbed a tree
And scraped his knee

A minute later, he declared he had a favorite song:

Wagon is dead
The soldiers came and killed him
Then he flew to heaven
And then he came alive again
The other part sang to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

A: "Oh look, there's an Israeli flag. I wonder how Israel is doing in the Olympics."
F: "What's Israel?"
A: "It's a country."
F: "What country?"
A: "Israel. It's the country of God's people, before Christ. Now there's lots of fighting there. And..."
F: "And cake."
A: "Cake?"
F: "Yes, because God like cake. God eats cake. And God's people eat cake. That's why we eat cake."
A: "Really?"
F: "Yes! Everybody eats cake in the whole world!"