Everyone Should Be Lucky Enough to Have an Uncle Brad

I didn’t write this, Kelly Parker did on her blog, but since I’m involved, and it’s so freaking funny I just had to put it here.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
SAILOR MOUTH
I’ve often joked (kind of) about wishing I had a “meal-time nanny”. You know…someone else to prepare the food my kids won’t want to eat; someone else to cajole them into not only picking up the veggies on their plate, but to actually put one or two pieces in their mouths; someone else to argue about how many bites is sufficient for a treat and someone else to scrape the mashed-up, dried noodles off the tile floor.
Mealtimes with young kids just isn’t my favorite thing.
Last night was no different, nor did I expect it to be. It was Friday, which meant House Church potluck – a bunch of different dishes brought by a bunch of different people which we all share and happily eat. Well, most of us.
During the course of dinner, I saw Gabriel playing around on his stool, his plate pretty much untouched. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Here’s the scene:
ME: Gabriel, stop playing around and get busy eating.
GABRIEL: But I don’t want to eat that crap!
ME: (standing there, mouth agape, eyes bugging out, momentarily speechless) What?
GABRIEL: I don’t want to eat that crap!
ME: (absolutely mortified) That’s not the way you talk about the food that people have made for you to eat blah blah blah. That’s your dinner and if you don’t eat that, you’re not getting anything blah blah blah!

I couldn’t believe what I had heard, nor could Kenny when I repeated it to him a minute later. Where had we gone wrong? The kid’s only three!
We make a point to regularly fill our house with friends and family, food and fellowship; a place where we speak freely of living a life modeled after Christ, and yet, all we manage to pass on is trash talk?
Clearly, we could now see that we were failing miserably as parents.
A little later, as I was helping the boys get ready for bed, the subject of “bad words” came up again. My composure regained, I was ready to tackle the situation a bit more positively, perhaps even teach him a timely little lesson about thankfulness and all that junk.

Scene #2:
ME: Gabriel, you said a bad word tonight, didn’t you?
GABRIEL: Yeah, but Uncle Bad put that crap on my plate and I didn’t want to eat that crap.
ME: Huh?
GABRIEL: Uncle Bad put that crap on my plate and I didn’t want to eat it.

Suddenly, it dawned on me. Uncle Brad, notorious for torturing young children, had been trying during dinner to get Jake and Gabriel to try some of the CRAB that someone had brought to share. Despite Gabriel’s refusal, some still wound up on his plate.
I breathed a little sigh of relief – so we weren’t the worst parents in the entire world, Supernanny wasn’t on her way over that very second. He was still just our sweet little picky eater.
And really, I couldn’t blame him for the not-wanting-to-try-seafood thing – I wouldn’t want to eat that crap, either.

Now that is some funny mama-jama! OK in my defense- I do not torture young children… well OK, I guess I’m guilty on that one (I threw an orange at my nephew Josh today, and he cried. I wasn’t trying to hurt him though, and I did offer him a free shot, but he wouldn’t take it.), but Gabriel didn’t refuse the crab. I asked him if he wanted to try it, and he said yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it on his plate. No, I’m serious I really wouldn’t have. He only refused it after it was on his plate. He should’ve tried it though, it was really good crap… er crab.

Now I’d like to share another excerpt from Kelly’s blog. In this one I impart some of my expansive wisdom to young Gabriel.

Monday, February 14, 2005
NICE
“Nice” is a hot topic in our family. Kenny and I are constantly extolling the virtues of “being nice” - talking nice, playing nice, being nice to friends, siblings, etc.
“That was so nice of you to share with her.”
“Do you think that was a nice way to talk to me?”
“It’s so nice to see you kids playing quietly together!”
And the list could go on and on.
Consequently, Gabriel also talks about “nice” a lot. Mainly, he concerns himself with “nice guys” and “not nice guys”. In his world view, you’re either one of the two and he’s determined to find out which one. This entails nonstop questioning:
“Mama, he a nice guy?” “Mama, he not nice?” “Why he not nice?”
I try my best to explain, in three-year old terms, about moral character and making good choices, about how some people might choose not to be nice and the reasons why, and why we should choose nice instead.
Usually, my explanations are followed by a barrage of more “whys” and “how’s”, leading me to believe that he’s either
a. not fully understanding me or
b. trying to drive me nuts.
Yesterday, Gabriel was playing Star Wars with his Uncle Brad when I overheard this conversation:
Gabriel: (pulling out an action figure) Who’s he?
Uncle Brad: He’s a _________(some guy who’s probably not even in any of the movies that only a Star Wars dork would know.)
Gabriel: He nice?
Uncle Brad: No, he’s not nice.
Gabriel: Why he not nice?
Uncle Brad: Because there have to be not-nice guys so that the nice guys have someone to fight.

And that was it. End of story. No “whys” or "how’s” following that answer. His explanation seemed to make perfect sense to Gabriel.
Now, why didn’t I ever think of that?

Hey, that was some easy blogging. I need to torture Kelly’s kids more often, so I can copy and paste her entries instead of having to come up with my own.