Reverence

We usually sit on the same row at church, in front of the same family.  I’m beginning to think that they save the row for us because it is all too often available when we arrive during the opening hymn.  They are a cute family of four:  our home teacher, Ricky’s previous Primary teacher, a boy from Kevin’s Sunday School class, and one of my Young Women.  I’m positive they know our kids will keep them entertained and the boys always find way.  Ricky likes to wink at them over the bench and Rusty will drool on their fingers, but it is Billy’s antics that produce the muffled laughter.

Today, for instance, the chapel was quiet as the Sacrament prayers were read.  As soon as the bread began to be passed around, dear Billy yells, “HURRAY!  Hurry, hurry!”  Then he and I had to debate over whether he got 2 or 1 piece of bread.  The tray hadn’t even made it to our pew yet and he has yet to learn to whisper.  Once the tray did arrive, suddenly his request for 2 jumped to 3!  Kevin was skillful in keeping the tray out of his reach so Billy only got his one piece.  The family behind us could barely contain themselves.   And goodness only knows what they were thinking when Billy found a string, wrapped it around his waist and loudly declared, “Tie me up!”

I’ve mentioned before that Ricky is a good little reader and he is, but when the words get a bit long, he just sort of makes up his own ending.  Follow me on this one.  For his birthday, Ricky got some transformers and they came with names and instructions.  This reminded him that he had a few older transformers in the toy box from a couple of years ago, but these have long since lost any instructions and names that go with them.  Stay with me for a moment longer.  When Ricky was just little, I found an easy way to remember the names of his toys.  Most of them have a tag or label of some sort on them, so I just used a word from that.  So the dangly spider that hangs from the carseat handle is named “Lamaze” because that is the company who made it (I did this with our neighbor’s dog in our previous house, too.  we called him “Rabies” for many months.)  Now to tie all of this together.  These two transformers Ricky found in the basement were nameless, so to name them, he instinctively looked for their name on their body.  One became “Reverented” and the other “Hasband.”  He’d been calling them these names for a couple of days before I finally asked where he came up with them and he showed me.  On “Reverented,” he showed me the words “all rights RESERVED.”  And on “Hasband,”  he showed me “Made by HASBRO.”    Close.