Monday, May 18, 2009

Kipling and Eliot


Here are a few crazy things that have been heard in the Teeson home recently.

Mim:

Dear Jesus, Thank you that you died for our sins...and the bad soldiers killed you and put a sharp, pointy necklace on you...amen.

(Conversation in the car a while after Mommy explained to the kids that even when we go to Washington D.C. someday they won't let us just go see the President, because he's very busy and they have lots of men around to protect him.)

Mim: Did you know Goki's president died?

Daddy: He did? How?

Mim: Well, he didn't have anyone protecting him, so some soldiers in the town made him die.

(I told Art it sounded like a military coup)

Daddy: What was Goki's president's name?

Mim: Barack Obama, just like our president...(I started writing it down in my notebook and Art said if I blogged it our daughter would probably get arrested.) Goki's Barack Obama had a wreck a long time ago when Goki's family was fighting giants, but he's feeling better now. He just got four or five pieces of blood.

And no, for the record, we do not teach our children that soldiers are bad. In fact, I go out of my way to explain what soldiers are and are not, but they have developed their own view of it. Maybe I need to show them some of the pictures of soldiers helping people in Iraq or something.

Zaya:

Prayer 1 - (At Tina's house, while we were about to eat some enchilada casserole.) Dear Jesus, thank you for today, and thank you for milk that made this delicious cheese..this delicious cheese.. that's on this..this..thing...I wonder what it is. (This was all said in a very sincere little prayer voice.)

Prayer 2 - (Tonight at bedtime) Dear Jesus, thank you for the inner planets, and the outer planets, and earth...and even Pluto. Amen.

(I feel sorry for little Pluto too. Maybe he's picked up on that.)

The other night he thanked God for everything in an ever expanding circle in our universe, starting with our core and moving in an expanding circle to encompass all the levels of our earth, the planets, the solar system and galaxy and on out o nebulae and new stars. It was quite a long prayer, so the verbatim is gone.

5 comments:

Laurel Kornfeld said...

Don't feel sorry for Pluto--fight the wrongful demotion, and teach your kids that Pluto IS a planet and that the view excluding it is only one side in an ongoing debate. Only four percent of the IAU voted on the controversial demotion, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

Here are two other sites on this issue. Transcripts of the Great Planet Debate, held in August 2008 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in response to the demotion, can be found by Googling "The Great Planet Debate."

If we use an alternate, broader planet definition favored by Stern and like-minded scientists, which defines a planet as any non-self-luminous spheroidal body in orbit around a star, our solar system has 13 planets and counting: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.

aftergrace said...

Wow, where was the woman who commented above when I was teaching my elem. kids about planets? I could have used her knowledge.

Anyway, delicious cheese...that's such a crack up! :)

Qtpies7 said...

Such fun! I can't wait for Sam to get to that age! I hope he is half as funny as Zaya.

Laurel Kornfeld said...

Thank you for your kind words, aftergrace. I'm not a professional astronomer, but I am a writer and amateur astronomer and would be happy to help anyone home schooling their kids with lessons on the solar system (not for money, just because I love this stuff). Just email me at laurelkornfeld@netzero.net

Tina said...

Let me tell you, when I went to Washington D.C. I DID get to see the president (live and in person!) and it was much like seeing him on TV. They aren't missing out on anything grand. Although, it is pretty cool to say I was in the same room with the president.

I was very impressed with his sincere prayer. And also with his "compliment" that the meal was "fine...very, very fine." I am a good host to practice on, because if he ever says something, um, unflattering I will just laugh and not be offended.

Thank you for taking care of the dog while I was gone. I have presents for the kids (although, if I had known they were so excited about the president, my shopping would have been much easier!)