Sunday Afternoon Dinners

Dinner conversations are always something I could write about as a general rule but Sunday dinners just seem even more so. I thought I would share ours with you today.

Today our pastor handed out five dollar bills to every member's family and asked us to come up with a way to use it wisely to further the kingdom in the next year and next January we will report back to the church what we did with it. S1 thought we should buy a box of bullets and shoot some deer and share them with people who need venison. While I give him credit for thinking of it so quickly, I would like to toss that question out there to you friends in blogosphere and see what we come up with.

Back to dinner. It was chili on top of corn chips, a recipe we learned from the Farmers Wife (http://cohagenchronicles.blogspot.com/). The boys were raving over it and how wonderful it is and how it is now their favorite meal except for the little voice at the end of the table. It came from the face of the wrinkled nose. S4. “I don't love this food.”

“Tough,” his Daddy sympathetically told him.

To keep the tears from flowing from S4's eyes and break the silence of S2 and S3 who had just had to sit on the couch and hold hands until they decided they could, in fact, get along at the dinner table and not fight over a dinner spoon (another story I won't bore you with), I asked S4 what he had done in Junior Church that day.

“We got frogs,” he reported joyfully. I had seen the plastic frogs.

“Why?” I asked.

“We were good. Yup, we really good. Not Willie and George (not their real names), they are mean, but we singed some songs, we ate cookies and we had play dough and the froggie went right under the play dough and we played that goose goose duck game.” His voice got sad, he can change his emotions like a light switch when he wants to. “'Cept when S3 played goose goose duck he hit me and I fell and he was mean and I cried so the girl held me and I told her another cookie in my tummy would make me feel better so she gave me another cookie.”

Yah, junior church workers, I have fallen for that one too.

All this talking was keeping him from eating but made him thirsty so he began to drink his milk. However, the moment of silence caused him to remember the song that they had sung and he began to hum “I will make you fishers of men.” But you can't drink milk and hum at the same time easily so he really struggled and when S3 realized he was singing the song he began to sing it too so S4 had to put down his milk and sing along. “I will make you hmmm hmm humm, humm, humm, humm, hmmm hmm hmm. I will make you hmmm humm hmm if you follow me.”

“Did you forget the words?” Husband asked.

“No, we don't sing those words.” they continue to sing the song humming through the “fishers of men” words.

Singing made S4 even thirstier so he went for a drink again only to remember how mean those boys Willie and George and their little brother were. So he had to put his milk down again to inform us how naughty they were and the more he talked the more excited he got and the more excited he got until he was standing on his chair nearly yelling, “Those boys need to see the Smash Brudders! We will smash them! Then they not be naughty! Oh yah, baby, we the smash brudders!”

So we had to calm the whole table down now because all the boys thought this a great idea. And I was secretly wondering if they should keep watching D2, the Mighty Ducks if they were just going to get 'smash brothers' from that instead of hockey.

“But we are suppose to be nice to them.”

“They are NOT NICE, Moma,” S4 informed me, sat down and began to tell us about how all the teachers in Sunday school sang happy birthday to him.

“Oh, that's so nice!” I said happily, glad to change the subject from the naughty boys.

“No,” he hung his head sadly, “its not. It not my birthday so I don't love that when they sing to me. It not my birthday.”

Good gracious, not one of us can win with him today!

And that, folks, is just a snippet of dinner conversations on a Sunday afternoon. I spared you the crying of S3 when S2 said he hadn't given him a dinner spoon, the way they had to let a few more than a few farts and belches to be given the 'eye' by Moma....all that. This was the best of the dinner conversation.