How Church Rubs Off On Kids

In a fit of hunger about a couple of weeks ago I was at my dad's house and I grabbed the Betty Crocker Dessert Cookbook off the shelf and set about to find a recipe that would satisfy my sweet tooth that had been gradually increasing over the course of Lent. So many of my friends and family had given up desserts of one sort or another for Lent whilst I decided to give up alcohol. With two preschoolers and a new baby would I have rather given up sweets you betcha, but I digress. So I come across a recipe for Brandy Alexander Pie (which is a decadent chocolate pudding mixed with heavy cream and quite a bit of brandy) and I am salivating. I'm counting down the days till Easter.

Fast forward to Easter weekend. We go grocery shopping for the ingredients to make said dessert and we are short on chocolate wafers. Our choices were either chocolate graham crackers or Oreo cookies. We opted for the Oreo's figuring we would scrape out the white stuff in the middle and just use the cookies. Bonus: feed the white stuff to the boys and get them all hyped up on sugar so that they will eventually go into sugar shock and crash. Always seek the positive: early bedtime for the kids certainly qualifies.

We ended up using almost the entire package of Oreo's just to make the crust for the Brandy Alexander Pie. No I'm not interested in the calorie count. Needless to say we were left with a plate full of "white stuff" chips which our kids begin siphoning rapidly. It is always dangerous to have little hands around the cooking surface (not to mention little trip hazards hovering around your ankles) so Daddy decides to walk the plate of white stuff outside and begins divvying the chips out to the kids. In the process of handing them out I hold out a chip to Antonio to which he looks up at me and says "This is the Body of Christ." So amazed was I that I asked him to repeat what he said just so that I could be sure I didn't misunderstand. Sure enough it is exactly what he said. I am taken aback at a 4-year old who has yet to receive First Communion and recognizes that the "white stuff chips" are so very similar looking to the "Wafers" we receive in the Eucharist. It really validates me as a parent to see my child associate the mundane with something other-worldly.

Now Sunday School will be wrapping up in the next few weeks and Antonio will be sitting through mass with us all Summer. I hope he will be able to listen and retain some of what he hears...time will tell. It will be interesting since he is a typical 4-yr old and generally lacks the ability to sit quietly in one place for more than 5 minutes. Luckily we almost always sit next to families with similar aged children and I can only hope that they will be understanding of our plight. Odds are that over the course of the Summer we'll have another installment of "Kids Say the Darnedest Things." Stay tuned.