“Oh, be careful little mouth what you say,” goes the old Sunday School song. “For the Father up above is looking down in love….”
I should have been singing it the day my daughter and I had a conversation in her van. In the back sat three-year-old Benjamin Bean, half-asleep in his car seat.
The conversation wasn’t new. It had carried on for days, with little resolution. For some reason, perhaps because her family couldn’t have one at their house, Amanda had decided that her father and I must get a dog. She even employed a bit of charming coaxing – bordering on badgering – in her attempts to bring us around to her way of seeing things.
The Preacher and I like dogs. But we’d had enough dogs to know that at our stage in life, we didn’t want another one. I told her that.
She pushed. I resisted. She pushed some more. I resisted more. When she started suggesting breeds, things got a little silly. Our laughter even woke Mr. Bean, who listened quietly to our banter.
“Get a Lab,” she said. “It would be company for Dad while you’re at work. Dad likes big dogs.”
She’s right about that. “No, honey,” I said. “Think of the piles. Besides, I told you. We don’t want a dog.”
She ignored me – again. “Get a little one, then. Something cute and fuzzy, like Mindy.” We’d all loved Mindy, our last dog, a Lhasa terrier cross – small, adorable and fuzzy. But she lived to nineteen. We don’t have nineteen more years of pet ownership in us. And like all dogs, Mindy made messes. The kind we didn’t want in our yard where our grandbeans – Amanda’s own children – love to play.
“NO,” I said. “Even little dogs ...!”
I never swear. But in that moment I couldn’t come up with a better word than one beginning with “sh” for that brown stuff we didn’t want on our lawn. I surprised us both so much that our argument ended on the spot. We laughed so hard we almost hit the ditch.
“I have an announcement,” Benjamin Bean told his Sunday School teacher a few days later. Surrounded by his classmates, he climbed on a chair, and in his largest voice repeated my words – even the four letter one.
Oh, my. In Sunday School yet. His teacher told the pastor and his wife – who happen to be his parents. Amanda and Kendall wasted no time in setting their offspring straight on the issue of decent language.
Mr. Bean and I took a walk that afternoon. For the first few yards, he marched ahead without speaking. Suddenly he stopped, turned around and pointed at me. “Nana,” he said. “YOU MUST NEVER, EVER, SAY (insert word) AGAIN. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
Taken down by a three-year old.
The Sunday School song was right about God looking down in love. But the children are watching – and listening too.
Reminder to self: Oh, be careful little mouth what you say.
