Our Son, the Elephant

Yes, he’s an elephant. Jake, the highly-opinionated, well-read, decisive, witty, often foot-in-his-mouth man-child, is an elephant. Let me tell you about a couple of recent conversations in our home, and you’ll understand what I mean.

(Fellow Facebookers, my apologies for posting one you’ve already read, but it must be burned in the record for the sake of posterity, as well as for the benefit of my few, but important readers who are not on FB.)

We were sitting at the dinner table last week, everyone having separate conversations, whether with other family members, or themselves, when Levi hollers at me, “Mom! Jake called me a Democrat!”

After we laughed heartily for a few minutes, Levi asks, “What IS a Democrat?”

We had to explain in simple terms to this nine-year-old what political parties ARE, which is quite a task. I haven’t ever thought of what they really are, and the explanation seemed so ridiculous… hmm. Well, the whole thing really IS ridiculous.

I don’t have a clue what the original altercation was about, but I know that Jake pulled out what he considered to be a prime weapon on that one.

This morning, we had another ‘shining moment’, not only for Jake, but for Luke, who gave an unintended verbal testimony against my ability to teach History.

We study Latin in our home school, which we love, and the phrase for Levi and Luke to learn this week is ‘e pluribus unum.’ I thought it was on the dollar bill, but after searching, we only found it on coins. I told them that it means “out of many, one,” and asked them how it related to our money. Why on Earth would they put that on a quarter?

Silence, and looks of confusion and emptiness.

“Okay… what does that phrase have to do with our country?”

Luke replies, “Texas is the only one?”

Oh, Luke, my sweet, while the answer is wrong in more ways than one… it is, at the same time, so right! (No offense to my out-of-country, er, state friends, but Texas IS a republic, you know.)

(In my academic defense… Unlike state schools, we study history in chronological order, so we started in Ancient times and have only just reached the Elizabethan age. We will be starting Early Modern Times next semester, which will eventually include Texas history. Go ahead, ask them about Caesar, or the Visigoths that invaded Europe, or the rise of Islam in the Middle East. We’ll get to Texas somewhere down the line. On second thought, ahem, you might want to give us just a little heads up before asking about those things… so we can review. Thank you.)

Back to the lesson…

Jake, piping in from his ‘desk’ on the couch (our school desks were moved into storage for a time) says, “Out of many countries, only ONE spends the most!”

Um… good point, but, no.

And again, Jake offers his explanation, “Out of many millions, we only get a few thousand.”

Who IS this kid, and who has been sneaking him podcasts of conservative talk radio??? I really DON’T listen to that in the car!

I did explain that our country, the United States, was built by people from many different places, forming one nation, and so on, and so forth. (At least, I think that’s why e pluribus unum is on our coins. If you have more insight, please let me know…)

So, you might want to bring this boy some peanuts.

Oh, and he just came in and told me that he has finally cracked the Elvish code. I'm so relieved...