Operator? Operator?

It must be a bad connection...

Remember the telephone game? Pass a message along by whispering it from one person to another to another? It always was always funny to see what the last person said and to hear how different it was from the original.

A missionary was in our house yesterday. Evidently he came in and ate M’s sandwich… or so L says. L also says he’s invisible. M was really disturbed over this… mostly over the missing bites (or should I clarify—the bites she thought were missing) from her peanut butter sandwich but also over the idea that L was saying this missionary ate them. “A missionary did NOT eat my sandwich! And, anyways, if he’s invisible then how do YOU know he’s here?!” L said (with a big grin) that she can see him since she’s got “invisible eyes.” Understandably, I’m pretty confused as I try to figure out where L got this idea of a missionary “stealing” bites from my 6-year-old’s dinner... and why my 5-year-old is tormenting her so! But soon after L said he was invisible, it clicked. Oh, that’s right. I started all this. And then I just had to smile… ah, fond memories of grade school telephone… (Although I have suspicions that in elementary school some of the kids purposely altered the message as it went through the telephone line!).

Yesterday morning, in another moment of great distress, M (who is obviously tired and on the emotional side) “cried” (loud sobs and a big pouty face) because someone drank her milk and she didn’t even get one drink. I told her that she had actually been the one to drink it, and I showed her how the other kids had their own cups and were using those. She insisted, “But! But I do not remember drinking it! I did not drink it!” To which I, the unbelieving mom, say “It must’ve been Marvin, the imaginary fellow in the house who likes to drink kids’ milks when they’re not looking… I guess we’d better keep an eye out—I hear he likes peanut butter, too.” (Now, do not think that I was being a mean, insensitive parent… I knew M was just being whiny, and I was trying to get her to lighten up.)

So in our unprompted and unplanned game of telephone, L overheard all this and thought I said that Marvin was the missionary fellow living in our house. And I guess I did say he liked peanut butter.

It is funny to realize what kids think they hear sometimes. My mom could tell you about the time I was swatting at the “nasty little Christians” with the fly swatter. Turns out, those pesky house flies weren’t nasty little Christians at all… just nasty little dickens.

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