A Little Penis and a Little Papist

Well, today was the big gender-reveal. It took the ultrasound tech an hour and a half to get a clear shot of Stormageddon’s head, but only half a second to get a clear shot of how very boy this baby is.

I’ll admit it, I cried a little on the inside. I had a little girl dream-baby all made up in my head, and it was hard to say goodbye to her. Plus, Charlotte (who had begged to come) was so angry that she’s not getting a little sister that she decided to be extremely unhelpful with Tank instead of delivering on her promise to be “very  helpful, I promise!” So Tank kept trying to climb onto the table and inadvertently lowering and raising it instead.

We were not the best thing that’s ever happened to that ultrasound tech.

On the other hand, Liam is thrilled. He’d been waiting for weeks to go see “the baby’s picture”, but this morning decided he didn’t want to miss school. I told him he wouldn’t miss that much, but he insisted that he’d miss “knowing things, and saying prayers”.

Prayers are important to Liam. He’s fascinated by Jesus, God, angels, the devil, and all things spiritual right now. This is great, of course, but sometimes he says things that are so stereotypically Catholic that it gives me the wigs and makes me want to go reform something.

Like last night, I asked him to clear the table. He cleared most of it, and told him to clear everything off. He looked at the table and said, “I did.”

“Liam,” I said, “I’m looking at something on the table right now.”

“Oh,”‘ he responded, “you mean the christlord?”

“The what?” I asked, sure that I had misheard him.

“This,” he said, picking it up to show me. “The christlord.”

“Liam,” I said slowly, “Christ is Jesus, and He is our Lord, but that is a rosary.”

“Oh,” he said, looking at it. “I thought it was a christlord, because we pray to it every morning at school.”

I started to go into a detailed explanation of the difference between praying to something and using something as a tool to help focus our prayers, but his eyes glazed over and I got a sudden urge to nail some theses to a cathedral, so instead I let him watch RescueBots and poured myself a glass of wine.