My kids' emotions are more complex than their ability to express them, so sometimes we have to tell them that new-age parental cliché, “Use your words!”
I've written about my eldest son's obsession with Jesus before. Today at daycare his little-girl playmate (whose parents are devoted Catholics) began talking about Jesus. J-man interjected:
"Oh, Jesus. He was nailed to a cross."
The little girl said:
"But after he died, he rose from the dead."
On this, Jesse had some pretty serious theological questions like:
Being a good Jewish boy, J-man is obsessed with ham and Jesus.
He was asking today about "the King of the Jews", while we drove home from his daycare. I told him that Christians believe he is like God. He asked me:
"...but does God believe God is God?"
"What a great question!", I praised him, but I had no meaningful response other than that. I looked at his face in the rear view mirror. He seemed proud to stump me.
Today at Synagogue, during Shabbat morning prayers, J-man and I were sitting near the back, and I was reading him the Shema.
I was explaining to him what it meant, teaching him that we have one god. On the Bima (the area in front of the synagogue where the Torah is housed) sat the Rabbi, the Cantor, the president of the synagogue, all of whom J-man knows personally.
So, everyone who knows me has heard of the J-man. He's a typical 4-year old who says funny things. He gets a lot of air-play.
His kid-brother is under represented and is funny in a different way. While he doesn't speak much (he's just 2), he does a lot of funny things.
One thing to know, is that due to his hypotonia, he gets a foot massage each night with a loofah. He's now begun to request these massages, by agressively sticking assorted loofahs in our faces.
Tonight we ate boneless-breast of chicken for dinner. When we were putting the J-man to bed we read him a story with drawings of chickens. The J-man informed us that those were not the kind of chickens that we eat.
We asked him what kind of chickens we eat. He said:
"Those are not the chickens we eat, those [the drawings in the book] are chickens with faces. The chickens we eat are in their body and come out of their butts and go to the supermarket for people to eat."